


Fandoms, Fandoms Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink

by closetcellist



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Eternal Law, Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Hellblazer, Supernatural
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-06
Updated: 2013-02-03
Packaged: 2017-11-23 23:02:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 49,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/627472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetcellist/pseuds/closetcellist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A meta, crossover fanfic in which Hastur, Duke of Hell, tries to save his reputation but ends up running through a gamut of universes including Supernatural's, Buffy's, and Hellblazer's in his attempt to get out of Hell and back to Earth to take out Crowley and Fell that angel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: In Which Personal Headcanons Are Explained and Other Fics Are Liberally Referenced

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Operation Salvation](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/15366) by H. J. Bender. 



> This story was written for NaNoWriMo 2012, and contains spoilers to a lot of things, basically any fandom listed. But if you don't mind those, go forth. This story also contains a lot of me talking to you, so, my darling readers, if you don't like being called 'darling readers' in the middle of your read, this may not be the fic for you.  
> I own nothing and profit less.

It wasn’t the flames.  He was used to those, all demons were.  Fire was a part of them from the moment they fell, and nothing ever compared to that first searing _emptiness_ of their Grace being torn from them, their essence violated with the most intense emptiness, an unimaginable, unfillable ache.  It wasn’t the various tortures being inflicted upon his essential being by demons of lesser rank (though it did sting a little to have one’s bowels opened by the blunt claws of Murmur for Satan’s sake, _really Murmur?_ He’s the demon of music or something isn’t he?  What is he, like an Earl?  At best?)  It wasn’t even that.

No, it was the knowledge that he _hadn’t done anything wrong_.  Or…right, rather.  He’d been framed.  By God or Angels or blind, fickle, cruel chance.  But he had acted with the intent to commit deeds of foul evilness as befitted his station.  His intentions had been good.  Or bad. Whatever.  _Appropriate_.  How could he stand for this (or lie chained to a metal rack kept just below the point of melting into a puddle for this, if we want to be absolutely accurate in our phrasing)?  His reputation besmirched (and not in the good way), his name the punchline of every joke.  They weren’t even funny jokes.

He couldn’t, that’s how.

So Hastur began to plan his escape.

Now, based on his brief appearance in _Good Omens_ , and how hilariously, campily evil he seems to be in there, and based on Halobender’s “The Return of Hastur” and “Operation Salvation,” you might expect that, maybe, he wouldn’t be so good at slow plots that take a while to come to fruition.  But he is presented as a demon of the Old Guard (isn’t Crowley really the only New Guard demon?  If you can count him as totally on that side at all?) who takes pride in corrupting souls and is willing to wait 10 years to corrupt a priest through impure thought.  This Hastur plays the long game, which will be important later in the story.

So Hastur began to plan his escape.

They thought they were reprogramming him, purging from him the pollution of goodness that had somehow tainted him and led him to commit such vile acts of charity and faith.  They were only reaffirming how desperately right Crowley had been about some things, such as how blind Hell could be sometimes, how terribly stupid.  Hastur played along.  Screamed when he should scream, begged when he should beg, and it didn’t even kill him to do so—this was just another part to play and Hastur was a master of manipulation when it suited him to be so.  It would take decades, centuries (at least, so it seemed in Hell) before he was taken from the racks and moved to what was comparably a rather comfortable hole in the ground and buried up to his neck.

This was what he had been waiting for, what he knew was coming. This torture, besides being vaguely uncomfortable and claustrophobic (but what was the press of sulfurous dirt compared to the knowledge of your eternal entrapment in Hell?), was solitary.  There was no torturer but your own mind, and when your mind was on your side (as Hastur’s was ninety-nine percent of the time) it was like the jailer leaving the key in the door of the cell.

Do you remember that episode in Season…six? when Grandpa Winchester (though really, his name's Campbell) had captured the alpha vamp and had him strapped to that chair with leather straps and he slowly, slowly, patiently clawed his way through one of them to free himself without anyone noticing?  Do you also remember those nature documentaries about baby turtles and how they get out of the sand when they are hatched from their eggs, slowly, slowly pushing tiny amounts of sand under themselves to boost themselves up to the surface?  Well imagine a combination of those two things and that’s pretty much how Hastur got out.  Isn’t that a hilarious mental image—Hastur as a baby turtle?  Hahaha yeah.  Let’s move on.

Freeing himself from the Pit of Despair torment was the easy part.  He was free from supervision and free from physical bindings and restrictions, but he was still in Hell, his life was still in ruins, and he was still the laughing stock of the lower circles.  He had an idea—not a new idea, granted, but still.  It had been a good idea when he had come up with it in the first place and he would be damned again if he was going to let go of it just because he had been interrupted and arrested before he could finish enacting it.  For those of you who haven’t read “Operation Salvation,” the idea was:

Kill Crowley and Fell his angel (not necessarily in that order), thus finally achieving his revenge while simultaneously giving his reputation the reboot it so sorely needed.  Obviously he would have to alter the details of _how_ he was going to do those things, seeing as the same approach would so very definitely not work twice.  But sometimes having a simple overall plan was best and the details would often work themselves out later.

With this in mind, bolstering his sense of purpose, Hastur worked on getting out of Hell.

He had two readily apparent options, and a third which he liked a lot less, but which would probably be the one he had to use, because honestly, when is it ever the easy option?  He could wait in a deep and hidden corner of Hell (and there are plenty of those, if you take the time to look and Hastur had, a long time ago, because he was paranoid.  That’s why he’s a Duke now and other demons are still just peasants) until he could latch onto an undirected or generic summoning spell, hitch a ride, and devour the summoner before he could be banished back.  He thought briefly about waiting for a _specific_ summoning spell, because that would be a lot easier and a lot less stressful, but it had been a long time since he had last been summoned by name.  Humans these days.  No class.

He could bribe his way into Hell’s body shop and “borrow” a pre-fab meat-suit already waiting for a lower demon about to be sent on a routine temptation, then slip out one of the side doors to Earth and spend his time on Earth laying low until he could get to Crowley and enact his plan, because if he used bribery, he would certainly be ratted out the moment he turned his back (literally the moment he turned his back—he would still be in the shop and he’d have to leg it pretty fast to get to Earth still in the suit).

These were the readily apparent options (not the easy ones—there are no easy ways to get out of Hell), ones that required the least amount of effort on his part, the ones that he preferred.

The final option would bring him the least notice and would be the least easy to trace, perhaps impossible, giving him significantly more time and relatively more safety.  His final option was to make his own way out.  To claw his way through the cracks in Hell, the cracks in the fabric of its creation, slip into the Void and claw his way into Earth.  It was fraught with danger.  The Void was just that, a void, with no directional arrows saying “this way to Earth.”  He could end up anywhere or be trapped in nowhere forever, unable to even get back to the familiar glow of hellfire, because once you slip through, one crack in the fabric of the universe looks very much like another.

This last option, of course, was exactly what he chose.

‘Now hold on a moment,’ you may be saying (or not, I have no idea how invested in this story you are, probably not at all, but for the sake of argument let’s say you said “now hold on a moment”) ‘how would Hastur, an “Old Guard” demon, as you the author laid out earlier, how would he know about cracks in the fabric of the universe and hidden passage ways between worlds and stuff?  Wouldn’t he pretty much always use Hell’s front door (or the employee’s entrance, at least), especially being a Duke and all?’  That is a perfectly valid question, dear reader, and I will give you a terribly well-thought out answer just as soon as I come up with one.  Until then, have this explanation: Do you remember in…oh _Moving Pictures_ or _Reaper Man_ when the older, important wizards knew how to sneak out the back ways of Unseen University because once they had been unimportant students?  Well, newly established demons (be they Dukes or not) are much like unimportant students, except with the added threat that one of your classmates might disembowel you for looking at them wrong, and then usurp your place at the head of the class.  So when he first fell, after the initial shock had worn off, he took the time to get to know the place.  Intimately.  Also, once, when he was on Earth in the 600s or so, visiting Scandinavia, he met a god named Loki who may have just let it slip that there were secret passages between the nine realms.  That probably also happened, because why not?

And so, with that out of the way, let’s get back to Hastur.

He opted to take precautions, and combined plans one and three.  There was a barren and rocky wasteland somewhere on the edges of the sixth circle, outside the gates of the city of Dis that no one really went to except the occasional heretic soul that got out of their flaming sepulcher and wandered away.  Its random rocky formations and lack of activity were ideal for Hastur.  There were cracks all over the place if you had the patience, time, and the eye to see them, and two out of three ain’t bad.  Getting out of Dis and past the view from the Wall was the hard part.  Finding a crack in a sheltered area was easy compared to that.

It took a couple of decades to scrape away enough of Hell’s basic structure to create a hole big enough to stick his hand through, but he had the patience.  There were a few close calls when the Furies who patrolled the wall took rather wider circles than strictly necessary and one time when a wandering heretic stumbled upon him and set about wailing to wake the dead, but Hastur ate him before his wails could be distinguished as different from the wails of torment coming from the rest of the denizens.  Eventually, piece by piece, chip by chip, he widened the crack enough to slip through his upper body and he knew it was enough.  It was time.

He took a moment to get his bearings, because once he slipped through there would be nothing to help him.  He would have only once chance.

A chance he almost lost in his disorientation when he made his move.  He knew which direction Earth was in, but clinging with fingertips to the edge of the rift he had made in the universe and staring out into the endless emptiness lit only by the light shining from a million million minute cracks in the blackness, for a long moment he felt lost, small, and very alone.

Luckily, Hastur had spent millennia (in Hell time, about 6000 years in Earth time) being not especially deep and introspective, so closing his eyes and thinking of revenge, he guesstimated and leapt without much fear.

As his claws scrabbled past a crack and didn’t catch, he worried he had missed his chance, but they caught a little lower, close enough that he didn’t worry he’d missed, and he began the process of breaking the universe all over again.  Without distractions (with the endless living dark nothingness breathing down his neck) he made better time (probably, or maybe the fabric of Earth was more fragile than that of Hell) and days or weeks later he crawled his way, exhausted but triumphant, into the basement of a bar in Montana.

Hastur’s true form drives men to madness with a second’s glance, but he hadn’t stopped to pack a meat-suit on his way out.  Some high ranking demons can create a body out of the ether, especially if they are familiar with how they work and what it’s like to wear one.  Taking a moment to get his metaphorical breath back, Hastur made an inner inventory or his powers and found, to his surprise, that he has brimming.  Think Iron Man’s suit after Thor hit him with lightening in the _Avengers_.  He thought very hard in thirteenth-dimensional mathematics and looked at his hand. His very human hand, with only a hint of claws, not noticeable in low light at all.  He had even manifested a rather nice grey suit with a yellow silk shirt and was that…yes, a tie pin with his sign on it.

Hastur grinned.  This was going to be a lot more fun than he thought.


	2. Chapter The First: In Which All Cities in the United States Are Not an Hour Apart

This was turning out to be a lot less fun than Dean thought.  They had been driving along I-55 for hours, driving towards some tiny town in South Dakota to investigate a series of recent disappearances.  Driving from New Orleans, where they had just finished taking out a nest of vamps—typical, right, finding the one town in the world where everyone believed in vampires, and half the people visiting wanted to be one.  It had taken days longer than they anticipated to find the nest, though once they did the vamps were easy enough to gank.  Where was he?  Oh yes, complaining.  They were only just reaching Memphis.  It had been six hours, cruising at eighty miles per hour.  That’s a lot of miles.  It’s like two hundred and forty or something and they were still _just reaching Memphis_.  Something was wrong.  It had to be.  They’d been driving across the entire United States how many times over the last five years...and throughout their childhood and it just didn’t take this long.  Sure, it might look big on a map, but once you got behind the wheel of a car the scenery just flew by and there you were, in another town whose name you’d hope to forget, fighting another monster, expelling another demon, putting to rest another spirit, and it _didn’t take this long_.

Sam was asleep in the passenger’s seat and he had a minor moral dilemma trying to decide if he could get away with turning up his music without waking his brother.  He decided that, for right now, a bitchy Sam wasn’t worth it.

Instead, he decided to focus on the case, so he at least wouldn’t fall asleep and crash Baby into a tree.  Fixing her up once after getting her hit by a truck was hard enough.  He didn’t need to go through that pain again, and he especially didn’t need it to be his fault.

All right.  Six people missing in one day from a tiny bar in a tiny town in the middle of Montana, the least frickin’ populated state in the whole country.  Six people from Winnett, Montana, population 186, taken from a bar called the Kozy Korner Bar and Café.  That’s definitely a red flag.  Reported as missing to the police, though two weeks later there they were—six skeletons, picked shining, sparkling, science-lab-display clean in the barren waste of a prairie that surrounded the functioning ghost town.  But that’s not where they were headed, because there were no more disappearances reported in that area of Montana.  Next door, on the other hand, a couple of reports, scattered and unclear, had come up, pointing to a potential new location for their monster of the week.

Dean drummed his fingers on the wheel and frowned as he watched yet another mile marker fly by without seeming to bring them any closer to their destination.  He gave up and turned up his music.

Sam woke with a start at the first power cord.  He looked incredulously at his brother.  “Really, Dean?  I was sleeping.”

Dean grinned as he glanced over.  “And now you’re not.  Come on, Sam.  I’m bored.  We’ve been driving forever and we’re only in Memphis.  Doesn’t that seem weird to you?  We should have been there already and there’s still more than half the country in our way.”

“Well, Dean, it does actually take time to drive all the way across the United States.”

Dean grumbled.  “Not this much time.”  Sam just gave him a look.  You know the one.  Where his brow sort of makes this really straight line and he looks at Dean from under it like he really can’t believe he just said that.  “Fine.  Since we have so much time to waste, how ‘bout you use that college-educated brain of yours and tell me what we’re even going after this time so we can be prepared when we get there next year.”

Sam deflated.  “Well, according to the reports, the bones were picked clean.  Practically polished.  So it’s definitely not a werewolf, though the time of the disappearances would have ruled that out anyways.  It’s also not a skin walker or a shifter.  It’s not a vampire, because they don’t eat people, they just drain them.  It could be a Rugaru, a really hungry one I guess, but they usually leave more of a mess behind.  It could also be another Wendigo, but again, doesn’t really fit, there’s not enough time between the victims and the bones are just _so clean_.  Maybe it’s something new.  Or maybe it’s actually just a serial killer and it’s not our kind of thing at all.”

“No, it’s definitely our kind of thing.  Maybe it’s…I don’t know…like a really powerful ghost or something.  Tied to a cursed object.  A really cursed object.  And it ages it’s victims down to their bones.”

“That would be a great theory if the bones were brittle and old looking, but the coroner’s report said they were in “shockingly good condition.”  Those are the exact words they used.  They were totally stumped.”

“Them and me both.”

“Where exactly are we headed again?”

“Faith, South Dakota, T-Rex capitol of the world.”

“Seriously?”

“Read it on their website.”

“And why do we think our mystery monster is here and not just laying low somewhere in Montana?”

“Two disappearances along US-12—both cars left on the side of the road, open and empty, the drivers and passengers completely gone.  No trace of the families or an attacker, no blood, no sign of a struggle.  The local police are mystified.”

“All right. I’ll buy that it’s on the move, but why do you think it’s in Faith?”

“Well, part of me is pretty sure that the universe just wouldn’t let a joke that good pass on by.  But the other part of me is pretty sure that the guy described in Faith’s latest police report is Cas, and if Cas is there, especially now when every time we call him he bitches about his war in heaven, there has to be something important going on.”

“Wait, Cas is there?  Why didn’t he come to us?  And why was he in a police report?”

“Who knows why he does anything, man.  Apparently, the angel likes to party.  He was given a ticket for drunk and disorderly conduct.”

“Angels drink?”

“Seems like it.  Though it could just be Cas being Cas.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Sammy, but he’s not all that great at acting like a normal person.”

“Yeah, but still.  Why didn’t he just poof out of there?”

“Must be something really important in that city.  Or maybe he just really likes dinosaurs.”

Sam sighed.  “I’m not sure this conversation is worth being awake for.  Face it, Dean.  We’re not going to be get anywhere on this case until we get to Faith, and we’re not going to get to Faith today.  We can drive through the night, but only if you let me get some sleep so I can take over driving for you in a few hours.”

“This is just so wrong.  We never have to switch drivers.  Never.  Maybe we’ve been cursed.”

“With what?  A slow driving curse?  You really think someone would curse the Impala, without you noticing?”

Until this moment, the thought of someone cursing Baby had never really occurred to Dean.  Once the implications of that statement became clear to him, he swerved to the side and slammed on the brakes.

“Whoa, Dean!  What are you doing?!”

“I have to check the car, Sam.  I have to make sure Baby hasn’t had some mojo worked on her.”

Dean made Sam get out of the car, and spent the next 20 minutes going over the whole thing, slowly, carefully, and methodically.  After finally convincing himself Baby was all right, he turned to Sam and revealed the good news.  
“Baby’s fine!”

Sam signed hand held out his hands in that ‘yeah, obviously’ gesture that he does.  “Great, so we wasted another half an hour.  Can we get back on the road?  We’ve still got like, eighteen hours to go before we hit South Dakota.  So if you want to get there anytime this month…”

They both got back in the car and sped off, driving in silence broken only by Dean’s choice in music for another few hours, Sam slipping in and out of sleep.  They pulled off the road and switched, having decided to drive as far as they possibly could before stopping, mostly to keep Dean quiet about something being wrong with the universe or geography or, heavens forefend, the Impala.  Dean tried to sleep, but being a Hunter was intimately linked with being an insomniac and being a Winchester was intimately linked with the need to alternately jealously hide and then ruthlessly examine your and your brother’s feelings.

“How are you doing Sam?”

Sam glanced away from the road briefly at Dean and realized this was going to be one of those ruthless examination times.  He preferred when these happened outside the Impala when they weren’t driving, giving him the option of walking away if he really didn’t want to talk.  Not that he ever could walk away from Dean.

“I’m fine, Dean. Really. Just try to get some sleep.”

“I slept.”

“Yeah, for like ten minutes.  Come on Dean, we’ll get there eventually and It would be great if you were able to function when we got there because we don’t know exactly what we’re facing. There’s nothing to worry about right now except sleeping, so you can actually help out with the research.”

“I hate research.”  Dean scrunched in his seat, trying to get comfortable in the seat so he could try to do as Sam suggested.

Sam drove for hours, then Dean, then Sam.  It was uncomfortable.  There were discussions about feelings and arguments about who got to control the music (Dean insisted it was always him, because it was his car—Sam insisted it was whoever was driving.  Sam won very, very briefly, then decided a bitchy Dean wasn’t worth it).  The Winchesters pulled into Faith some twenty-seven hours after they left New Orleans, exhausted, sweaty, cranky, and ready to gank whatever happened to be lurking in the town.  And if it had moved on during the day it took them to get there?  Just fuel on the fire.  They’d get it one way or another.

Sam turned to his brother.  “You were right, Dean.  It never takes this long to get between cities in the Impala.”


	3. Chapter The Second: In Which Only Hastur Sees How This Is a Party

Hastur took stock of his surroundings with the thoroughness and patience of a long-lived paranoid, which is essentially what he is.  The basement of the Kozy Korner Bar and Café was small and dark, but in the comforting sort of way that clean and dry store rooms can be.  Hastur sniffed in disgust.  He could hear the sounds of five…no, six humans above him.  One seemed to be walking across the length of the building, one pacing in a small contained area, and the others were seated, but not still.  He could smell frying food, youth, and energy.  After manifesting a body (and a really nice one at that, perfectly to his favorite specifications), he was _hungry_.

Hastur grinned in the darkness.

The basement stairs opened into the kitchen, which currently played host to one rather rotund cook.  She was singing to herself, and the wispy hair under her cap was just beginning to be streaked with grey. She didn’t hear Hastur approach, which was probably for the best.  She had no time to scream before she was enveloped in a wave of swarming, hungry maggots that stripped her to the bone in seconds.  When Hastur re-collected himself, he banished her sparklingly clean bones, sending them he knew nor cared not where.  Unbeknownst to him, he had swallowed more than just her flesh; he had swallowed her soul as well.

With significantly more pep in his step, he exited the kitchen and made his way around the counter into the dining area, where a waitress was helping a couple and their two children.  The waitress was young and blonde, her hair pulled back into a bun and her uniform reminiscent of a fifties diner.  She was working at the bar/café this summer to save up money for her journey to college.  In a couple of months, she was heading off to Carroll College.  Her acceptance there had been a surprise, but she hadn’t gotten her hopes up about it until she gotten the news that she would be receiving a full-ride scholarship.  She would be the first person in her family to go to college, something she had worked hard for over the past four years of high school.  This would also be the first time that she would be living on her own, and she was scared but excited and every day this put a smile on her face, conveniently resulting in slightly higher tips from the regular patrons, most of whom knew why she was so happy recently and who were all very proud of her—she was the town’s darling.  Her name is Jennifer Schmidt.

The couple Jennifer was serving were locals.  They had moved to Winnett twelve years ago, the husband drawn by a very good job offer and the wife agreeing to the move because she was sick of city life.  She had grown up in a small town and missed knowing every one of her neighbors, their kids, their problems, and their lives.  They had had an argument about a week ago, a pretty serious one that had resulted in several days of sleeping on the couch for the husband, about the wife’s sister and some of her life choices (she recently married her boyfriend of three months and the husband was less than tactful in his word choice describing his speculations on how free she was with her body) but they were moving past it, and had decided that an early lunch out with the kids would help that along.  Their names are Judy and Harold Aaronson.

The children, a boy and a girl, were eight and three respectively.  The boy will be starting third grade and his sister will be starting prekindergarten at Winnett School in the fall.  She is excited, but he isn’t, because this summer his best friend moved away to Billings, and he’s pretty sure he’ll never see him again.  It ruined his summer, a summer he had planned to spend taking full advantage of the lack of school and adult supervision.  They were going to go explore one of the abandoned buildings near the edge of town, something they had been expressly forbidden to do.  But then his friend moved, and he’s been moping for most of the summer.  Even the family vacation to Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park hadn’t really cheered him up, though he had thought the caves were pretty cool and was now planning on becoming a park ranger when he grew up.  His sister, on the other hand, was excited for prekindergarten, or as excited as children ever are at school.  She knew school was where her big brother went and she looked up to him.  She was excited about getting to do the same thing her brother got to do, she would be just like him, very grown up.  Currently, she is excited about the mac and cheese that her parents ordered for her.  It is her favorite food.  Her name is Sarah and her brother’s name is Daniel, but everyone calls him Dan, except when he’s in trouble.  Then his name is Daniel Julian Aaronson.  Julian was grandpa’s name, so even though some of the kids in first grade made fun of him, calling him “Julie,” he didn’t care.  His grandpa was really cool.

Hastur, of course, knew none of this and certainly wouldn’t have cared if he had.

He strode into the dining area and with a gesture locked the doors.  The little girl looked at him and started to cry.  The wife didn’t notice the man and turned to comfort her daughter, who seemed to be crying for no reason.  The little boy was very quiet, staring with wide eyes at the man, knowing that this was why his sister was crying and feeling that something was wrong but being unable to articulate what it was, unable to warn his parents.  The waitress turned when she heard footsteps behind her, thinking it was the cook.  She started in surprise when instead she saw a strange man.  Something about him made her uncomfortable, not least because he seemed to have come from the kitchen, which didn’t have its own door to the outside and she certainly hadn’t seen him come in earlier.  Still, she forced her smile back onto her face, and asked “Is there something I can help you with, Sir?”

Hastur smiled sharply as he approached, unaware that as he let his control over his form slip minutely, preparing for the change, his eyes turned solidly black.  The waitress’s smile fell and she turned very white.  Hastur reached out a hand to touch her face.  At first contact, he changed, his hand and arm turning once again to a living swarm of maggots (it really was the easiest and cleanest way to feed).  He took his time with her, eating her face first and relishing the tangible change in her mind as it broke to pieces, giving it that delicious tang of madness.  He had missed that.  The family began to scream, all except the little boy who had frozen, unable to move or look away.  He maintained a mostly human form as his maggoty limb finished stripping the flesh from the waitress’ body, cleaning her bones completely, leaving not a drop of blood uneaten.  Then he turned to the family.  The father was at the doors, pulling uselessly at the infernally stuck portals.  He picked up a chair and tried to use it to smash through a window, dropping it in a shocked despair when it the chair broke instead of the window, harmless against the Hellishly enhanced glass.  For all their screams, not even the smallest whimper of a sound would be escaping this building until Hastur was finished.  The mother had grabbed her children and was trying to hide them behind her in a corner of the room, but it wouldn’t be any use, especially now that Hastur was enjoying himself.  He approached the husband, who had retained a leg of the shattered chair and was holding it in front of himself as if it would really work as a weapon against this black-eyed, shape-changing man who had just devoured their waitress.  Still, it was a noble effort.

Perhaps we should pull back and give Hastur some space now.  I’m sure you see where this is going.  All you need to know is that he devoured all of them, bodies, minds, and souls, one at a time.

He ate the little boy last.

When he had finished, he banished the skeletons as he had done with the first, and removed the enchantment containing the building. The bar and café was silent now, as empty and barren as the surrounding plains.  And Hastur was feeling good[1].

After such a feast, Hastur felt like quite the glutton.  How pleasant.  He left the bar and took stock again.  This certainly wasn’t England, but the young woman had spoken English to him, so that narrowed it down a little.  Looking at the empty plains, he deduced that he was either in America or Australia.  As much as his obsession with killing Crowley had fueled him, pushing him and really taking over way too much of his existence, he didn’t feel rushed now.  He wouldn’t be spotted missing for quite a while, and even then they would think he was still in Hell somewhere, so there was no one on his trail yet.  He decided he could take his time figuring out where he was.

He began to walk, enjoying the feeling after all that cramped and uncomfortable time in Hell.  He found a road, and he followed it.  He didn’t know how long he walked before he saw a car, and he honestly didn’t care.  The first few that passed him over the couple of days didn’t stop, nor did he wish them to.  But as he continued walking, he found himself growing hungry again.  It wasn’t strictly _necessary_ for him to feed, but he didn’t really see the point in denying himself.  This was…it was a vacation.  He might as well indulge himself.

The driver of the next car that passed him found himself concerned about the man in the suit walking by the side of the road.  He didn’t look like a hitchhiker, not dressed like that and without a pack or anything.  Maybe his car had broken down, though he didn’t remember passing any.  Maybe he needed help.  He pulled his car over in front of the man and got out.  “Hey, man!  Are you okay?  Do you need any help?  Like a ride or something?  The next town’s pretty far from here.”

Hastur only answered with a smile and a subtle ripple of his form.

“Hey, what’s wrong with your eyes.  They look—oh god please no, n—!”

And that’s how Hastur continued along, leaving no traces except empty cars and banished bones.  If he had been a little more careful or conscious of where he was sending the skeletons, he might never have been noticed at all and the missing people might have remained just that.

He walked following US-12 for a week.  When he reached Faith, South Dakota, he had no real plans to stop, at least not for long.  It was just another little town, another chance to feed, sure, but not anywhere important and certainly not his destination.  He would have continued along after a quick snack, but then he realized something peculiar.  There was an angel in Faith.

 

  


* * *

[1] Or bad, or whatever.  You get the picture.  I’m not going to continue making this joke because it will get old and annoying very, very quickly, so we’ll use conventional language and work from the intelligent understanding that what is “good” for Hastur is quite the opposite of what is “good” for an angel, or a human for that matter.  We good?  We good.


	4. Chapter the Third: In Which This Isn't the First Angel to Cry on Hastur's Shoulder

Castiel, nominally an angel, was in Faith, South Dakota.  He wasn’t entirely sure why—he wasn’t entirely sure about much these days; meeting the Winchesters, stopping the apocalypse, free will was a bitch and it filled you with doubt and most of the time he didn’t know what to do.  With most of his powers gone after his apparent rebellion, he needed some place to sort his head out, and Faith seemed like as good a place as any. He would hear the Winchesters calling if they needed him.  Whether or not he would answer was a different question all together.

Just thinking about them made his head hurt.  He had done the right thing.  He knew it, on one level, he knew that this wasn’t how things should be, how they should be going.  Yet every other fiber of his being screamed that he had gone against the Plan, God’s Plan, that he had killed his brothers, rebelled, and was all around a Very Bad Angel.  Why else would he have lost most of his powers?  But why would he have been brought back at all, if he had done so wrong?

It was very complicated.

What his response should be to the demonic presence sliding into town, on the other hand, was very uncomplicated, and perhaps just what he needed right now.   A clear target, a clear goal, no complications, no inner angst, no problem.

Castiel appeared behind a man dressed in grey and yellow, who turned with a smirk as he materialized.  “Hello, angel.  I was just going to come looking for you.  How kind of you to save me the trouble.”

 Castiel frowned at this, because usually demons gave angels a _wide_ berth, unless they were especially powerful, but everything else in his existence had turned tospy-turvy, so why not this too?  It didn’t matter.  Castiel laid his hand on the demon’s head and closed his eyes, concentrating his power.

“Mmm, tingly.”

(All right, so here’s the thing.  This is the first time in the story that Hastur talks, and you, dear reader, are probably saying “you’re doing it wrong.  Where is his awesome and hilarious accent?  It’s the best part of him and if you can’t even do that right you don’t deserve to write Hastur.”  Well, yeah, that’s mostly true, but I have two explanations for you, both of which you are free to ignore because sometimes you have needs and authors don’t fulfill those needs and you just need some space or something.  Whatever.  The first reason Hastur’s not talkin’ cockney is the same reason George Bernard Shaw didn’t write out Eliza’s accent throughout the whole play.  It slows down reading, it slows down comprehension, it slows down writing, and it’s annoying if you aren’t super familiar with how every word sounds in that accent.  Honestly, if I tried, I think it would sound and read worse than this, so we’re going with the lesser of two evils here.

The second reason is plot related and less of an excuse, though if you want I suppose you are still free to imagine him speaking as he did in _Good Omens_.  This story takes place after _Good Omens_ , after HaloBender’s series, after Hastur has been alone in Hell, with the cumulative blame and ridicule of the legions of Hell falling on him for his part in the failed apocalypse and for his obsession.  And much after Daegaer’s Fall from Grace series, in which it is detailed that Hastur _can_ speak properly (“ain’t we getting’ all fancy wif our angelic speech patterns showin’?” or something to that effect) when he speaks to Michael as they witness Joan of Arc’s thing.  My assumption is that, just as we didn’t take Hastur very seriously when he spoke like that, neither did the other demons.  He could get away with it when Ligur was there and he still had the respect and fear of his underlings but the slew of disappointing performances on his part because of the notocalypse and the obsession have diminished his standing so that he can no longer get away with it.  And just as American’s seem to think that English accents (the accents of our former rulers, don’tcha know) demand more respect than our own, denizens of Hell respond with more respect to speech that is reminiscent of Heaven.  So angelic speech patterns it is.

Anyways, back to Hastur getting the tingles from being touched by an angel.)

Castiel stepped back in shock.  The demon was still there, completely unaffected. He looked at his hand as if it would be different, maybe missing.  Had he lost more of his powers than he thought?

Hastur looked at the confused angel, really looked, and could see the fraying grace and the sin just dripping off of him.  He was practically fallen already, just needed another good push.  Talk about picking the low hanging fruit.  If he could bag two angels…well that might even lead to a _promotion_.  “Something wrong, cherub?”

“I…am not a cherub.  You should have been exorcized.  Blasted out of the human you are possessing.  Why are you still here?”

“It’s not that easy to get rid of me, feathers.  I’m a Duke of Hell, not an imp.  And this isn’t a possession.  This body’s mine.  Made it myself.”

Castiel's confusion mounted, tinged now with fear.  Demons couldn’t build bodies.  They were just damned souls; they didn’t have that kind of power.  Even angels had to rely on human vessels—it was the only way to cross the planes.  He had to be lying.  Still, it seemed his powers weren’t working here.  Perhaps he could find out why the demon was here, and keep him busy, and…call the Winchesters.

“What are you doing here, demon? What do you want with these people?”

“Hmm, really, I think we can move past this “demon” “angel” thing.  You can call me Hastur. Or Your Disgrace, if you prefer titles.  And you are…?”

“Castiel, soldier of the Lord.  I ask you again—why are you here?”

“Now, that’s a little better.  I wanted a vacation.  Downstairs is so hot in the summer.  And the winter.  It’s all torture, torture, torture.  Can’t a being want to get away from it all for a while, take a stroll through this Creation that nobody can stop talking about?”  Hastur raised an eyebrow and gave his most convincing ‘I’m interested in what you have to say’ smile.  “What about you?  What are you doing in the middle of nowhere?  Something of interest to Upstairs hiding out here?  Or did you just need to break from all the righteousness?”

“Do you really think I would tell a demon if there was an interest of Heaven here?”

Hastur held up his hands in placation.  “I meant no offense.  Curiosity gets the better of us all.  Well, maybe not angels.  You are all so very good at accepting what you’re told.”  Castiel visibly deflated, dropping his aggressive stance for the first time during their encounter and Hastur smiled a little wider inside.  He adopted a concerned look.  _That’s the way.  Just a little further.  Talk to me angel.  Tell me your woes.  Let me give you something to really regret_.  “Is something wrong, Castiel?”

Castiel tensed, realizing he had given something away, but …maybe it didn’t matter.  This demon didn’t seem especially aggressive.  Maybe he could talk to him and get a different perspective.  Or at least distract him long enough that he could find a phone.

Hastur continued.  “You seem troubled.  More troubled than any angel I’ve ever met.  A little lost.  Halo a little crooked.  What’s troubling you?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your concern.”

“I like to listen to other’s tales of woe.  Humor me.  See if I haven’t heard worse.”

“…I fought with my brothers.”

“How heartbreaking.  The tale of every demon and every human with a male sibling.  Try again.  Impress me.”

“I tried to stop the apocalypse.”

Hastur paused.  Had there been another attempt while he was Downstairs?  Or had there been more than one discontented angel set on ruining a perfectly good war?  Honestly, how were angels these days getting away with such blatant rebellion.  Seems like certain entities were going soft, sticking to the essentials, only culling the flock when there was no other choice.  This angel’s grace was ragged, but still highly visible.  It was abundantly clear that he still loved Him, that he still placed Him in the highest place of honor in his heart.  Sinning alone wouldn’t do it, apparently.  What he needed was some good old fashioned despair.  To work that, he’d need more information, a personal, deeply held secret to really cut the heart out of him and drag him down.  He decided obvious sadness wasn’t the route to take.  “Now that’s getting warmer.  But that can’t be all.  If you’re still on Earth, there’s got to be something keeping you here.  Or perhaps some _one_.”

Castiel’s expression became more guarded.  He might be a poor example of an angel but he wasn’t stupid.  “No.  The Earth itself is precious to me.”

Guess he should take this a little slower.  “Now, this is a lovely chat, but I wonder if we couldn’t take it someplace a little more comfortable.  Might I escort you into town and buy you a drink?”  Hastur offered his arm, the perfect gentleman.  He didn’t miss the momentary flash of distrust and disgust in Castiel’s eyes at the suggestion.  So he knew he was on the edge—he was guarding what grace he had left very carefully.  “I mean you no harm,” Hastur lied.  “I merely seek a little company.”  Time to pull out a more effective weapon.  “I am unused to travelling alone.  The last time I was on Earth I came with my partner, Ligur.  We visited Russia, sometime, yes I think sometime in the early 1900s.  A new century, clean and full of possibilities…”

Castiel glanced around like he thought there might be another demon waiting behind a tree to jump him.  “Where is your partner now?” he said with a frown.

Hastur put on a closed expression, as if he were hiding something painful.  “Dead.”

“I’m…sorry for your loss.” And there was that relaxed posture again.

“But not the world’s loss, hmm?  One less demon to damn God’s favorite creations.”  _A flinch.  Good.  Good to know that was still a sore spot for those righteous, feathered bastards._   “Let me buy you a drink and we can talk about how much better Earth is than our respective spheres.  I imagine we can find enough neutral conversation on that topic to pass an afternoon.”

Castiel still hesitated.  If the demon was distracted, he wouldn’t be hurting anyone.  And he could slip out and grab Sam and Dean at some point.  But that would mean letting the demon into the town, putting people in danger.  This town was not working out as a quiet place to sort out his head.  “I won’t let harm come to anyone in this town.”

“Don’t worry,” Hastur purred with a satisfied smirk.  “I’ve already eaten.”

And so they walked into town, a very clear line of space between them as Castiel had once again refused Hastur’s proffered arm.  Hastur chatted aimlessly about the natural wonders he had seen with Ligur and on other assignments, leaving out the sex, blood, and violence to suit the stories to the delicate ears of his chosen audience.  He bought the angel a drink, still talking.  After the sixth, Castiel began to respond with stories of his own.  After most of the top shelf (which didn’t bother Hastur at all—it’s not like that money had existed before he reached into his pocket, and it certainly wouldn’t exist tomorrow), Castiel began to slump onto the bar, and with a little directed questioning, he began to talk about himself. Then he began to talk about his problems and his worries.  Then his fears.  Hastur offered some generic reassurances and his shoulder to cry on.  That’s when Castiel began to talk about Dean.

Hastur judged the level of intoxication to be sufficient and asked the angel if he wouldn’t be more comfortable talking about this in private, and yes of course there would be alcohol there.  As he helped the impaired angel off the bar stool and began to steer him towards the Branding Iron Inn (he liked the name), he met no resistance and he knew that he had won—it was just a matter of waiting.

It would a week before Sam and Dean arrived.


	5. Chapter The Fourth: In Which the Winchesters Have No Respect for Royalty

The first thing they did (after getting a room in the Prairie Vista Inn, taking a shower, and finding some food because cross-country road trips are _difficult_ and _gross_ ) was locate Castiel.  It wasn’t difficult.  The town was small and there were only two motels in the city; he wasn’t in theirs, and it didn’t take more than a GED to figure out the rest of that equation.   If the angel was participating in such human activities as drinking, he might be trying others and the first logical spot to look was a place of repose.  They found him in room 11, lying on a hideously patterned bedspread and staring at the ceiling.  Turns out even when they get drunk and take motel rooms, angels don’t sleep.  Of course, “found him in room 11” meant asked the desk clerk if a man of his description had checked in, gotten the room number, pounded and received no answer, and then picked the lock.

“Cas?” Dean asked, looking suspiciously around the room as if it could explain what the hell was going on.

“Yes.”

“…Dude.  What the Hell?  What are you doing here? What’s going on?”

Castiel frowned.  “You are very loud.”

Dean walked up to the bed and scrutinized the recumbent figure while Sam began methodically checking the room for anything unnatural or dangerous.  “Are you _hungover_?”

“No… yes.  Probably.”

“How much did you drink?”

Castiel furrowed his brow in thought.  “Several bars.  Or one bar several times.  It is a little unclear.”

Dean rolled his eyes.  “I’m sure I’m going to just love the answer, but why are you getting drunk in South Dakota?  Why are you even in South Dakota?  Is God in South Dakota?  Or were you just taking a break from your very important job to have a weird little Spring Break, _Angel’s Gone Wild_ moment?”

Castiel frowned.  “I don’t understand that reference.”

Dean rubbed his face as if he could somehow wipe off his frustration at Cas’ continued inability to focus on the important parts of his questions.  “Cas.  What are you doing here?  Is there something important?  We were tracking a monster from Montana that ate at least six people—is that why you’re here?”

“I was… I was trying to find God.  I… there were rumors that perhaps in the west… it’s been very frustrating.  Disheartening.  I needed some time to think.”

“So you went and got drunk?  Yeah, that’s a good way to sort yourself out.”

“No, that… that wasn’t my intention.  I merely wanted a quite place to reflect.”

“Are you trying to tell me you accidentally drank several bars?”

“It was probably one bar several times.  This town is very small.”

“Cas.  Focus.  Work with me a little here.”

“I… met someone.  He offered me many drinks and listened while I talked to him. He… seemed to understand some of the difficulties I have been having in relation to my purpose and my recent decisions.”

“Cas, the next time a strange man offers to buy you a drink, you yell ‘stranger danger’ and go get an adult, all right?”

“Dean, I am thousands of years older than you.”

“And yet here we are.”

Sam, who had been watching this exchange from the chair in the corner after his thorough room check, chimed in.  “It’s great that we found Cas, but we are in the middle of a hunt here.  Has there been anything strange going on in this town?”

“Besides drunk angels getting arrested?  How are you paying for this room, anyways?  You don’t have money.  Are angels allowed to make money?  That would be kind of useful.”  Castiel muttered something Dean couldn’t hear.  “Sorry, I didn’t catch that.  Speak up and share with the class.”

“I said,” Castiel enunciated with a glare, “ _he’s_ paying for it.”  He couldn’t hold Dean’s gaze and looked at the floor.  “My… new friend.”

Dean threw his hands up in exasperation and turned to Sam.  “We leave him alone for five minutes and he gets a sugar daddy.”

Castiel looked confused.  “He is certainly not my father.”

“Dean, as strange and upsetting as this conversation is, we are trying to hunt a monster.  Maybe we should try and focus.”

“Sammy, if the monster isn’t here, we’ve just given it a day and a half to disappear and we’re going to have to wait for it to surface again.  If it is here, it’s been here for a while and probably isn’t leaving right now.  I think having a little angel intervention isn’t the worst idea right now.  If this were me, what would you do?”

“Dean, this _is_ you.  You get drunk and go to motel rooms with strangers all the time.”

Dean paused.  “Yeah, well.  I’m not an angel.”  He turned back to Castiel.  “Who is this guy and what did he want from you?  Was he a human?  Did he know you’re an angel?”

Castiel kept his gaze averted and didn’t say anything.  It wasn’t… shame, because nothing had happened to cause that.  Hastur had been shockingly nice, willing to sit and listen to everything.  While it was undeniably suspicious, he sort of hoped it wasn’t more complicated than it seemed—two supernatural beings that needed to talk to someone who might understand the nature and magnitude of the decisions they had to make when they strayed from the plan.  From what Hastur told him of himself, it might be just that.  He hoped it was.  But even if it was true and Hastur wasn’t a threat, he was still a demon (though actually, Castiel had been having doubts about that.  He suspected Hastur might be a pagan god, or, and this was not a little frightening, a creature escaped from purgatory, as he was certainly more powerful than any demon had a right to be and his description of his escape from “hell” _through the fabric of the universe_ rang uncomfortably true to that theory) and Sam and Dean would want to kill him.  They wouldn’t understand this, as they didn’t understand much of what Castiel tried to tell them.  Hastur was… seemed… nice, and Castiel just preferred that his only friends on Earth not try to fight to the death.  But they had a right to know, he supposed, in case his judgment in this matter turned out to be as poor as his judgment of half of his brothers in heaven.  They should at least be given a chance to prepare themselves, especially because, if he wasn’t mistaken in his mildly hung over state, Hastur was currently on his way to this very room.  Right.  They were going to go out for pancakes.

“Well?”  Dean pressed.

“He’s… he knows I’m an angel.  He’s not human.”

“Is he another angel?  Is this some weird angel bonding exercise?”

“No, he… seems to be a demon.”

“You let a demon buy you drinks and take you back to a motel room?  Great.  Just great.  I think Sam’s infected you with something.”

Sam ignored Dean’s obvious jab about Ruby and focused on the important part of Castiel’s statement.  “What do you mean ‘ _seems_ to be’ a demon?”

“He’s… more powerful than any demon has a right to be.  I tried to banish him when we met but it… didn’t work.  It should have.  Even angels of the lowest rank can banish demons with a touch.  But he just said it… tingled.”

“Oh good.  He sounds swell.”  Dean started to pace.  “Does holy water work on him?  Salt?  Iron? Anything?”

“Well, you know Dean, when beings are willing to actually sit down and listen to you, your first response isn’t always to try to kill them.”

“Which I must say, I greatly appreciate.”

Sam and Dean whirled around to see a tall man in a grey and yellow suit leaning nonchalantly in the doorway of the motel room.  He stood straight and gave a low bow, saying, “Hastur, Duke of Hell, at your service.” He straightened up and looked the Winchester’s over, turning first to Dean and then to Sam.  “You, I take it, are Dean Winchester.  Which would make you Sam, if I’m not mistaken?  Castiel has been telling me so much about you.”  He remained by the door—he had heard the question about holy water, and he had realized he was playing a more dangerous game than he had anticipated, though Castiel had been kind enough to reveal what the brothers did with their lives, so it wasn’t a complete shock.  Still, having part of himself melted away by a flask full of holy water wasn’t high on his to do list.  He would have to play this carefully or hope they didn’t have any with them—though it did seem that the angel had been doing a marvelous job of making him seem unthreatening.

The brothers Winchester had taken up defensive stances.  Most of their weapons were outside in the Impala.

“There is no need to look so worried.  I did not come here to fight.  I simply wanted to check in on dear Castiel here and see how he fared after our rather exciting night out.”  Hastur was pleased when Castiel responded directly to him, ignoring Dean’s exclamation of “Christ, Cas, he’s clearly evil.  You’re lucky you didn’t wake up tied to a railroad track.” 

“I’m… much better, thank you Hastur.” 

Still so polite.  His face when he fell would keep Hastur’s cold and empty heart warm for centuries.  Hastur looked at the three of them and made his play.  Facing Castiel, he said, “I stopped by to ask you out to breakfast, but due to a slight delay, it seems more likely to be lunch.  Your friends are, of course, more than welcome to join us.”

“Of course,” Castiel replied, earning him an incredulous, ‘what do you mean _of_ _course_ can’t you see how evil he is’ look from both Dean and Sam.

Obviously Castiel had lost his mind.  Or been seduced.  Or hypnotized.  Or brainwashed.  Fine.  If they were playing it this way, fine.  Dean turned to Hastur with an obviously fake smile and held up a finger.  “Would you mind waiting outside for a moment… Hastur, was it?  There’s just something we need to discuss with Cas.  It won’t take more than a minute.”

Hastur locked eyes with Dean and smiled.  It wasn’t reassuring.  “Of course. I understand you haven’t had a chance to really talk in some time, what with all of the important emergencies happening recently.  Take all the time you need.”  And with that, Hastur turned his back on the trio and left the room, closing the door behind him.

“What is _wrong with you_ Cas?” Dean hissed as soon as the door closed.  “We’re just going to go have breakfast _with a demon whose been plying you with alcohol for days and looks like the villain from a ‘20s movie_?  Have you lost your mind?!” The last part was more of a shout.

Castiel winced, more at the noise than the accusation.  “No.  I’m going to have lunch with what is probably a pagan god.  My mind is fine.”  Castiel walked to the door.  “You don’t have to come.  But that monster you’re hunting is probably him, so if you want to keep an eye on him, you should probably join us.  Then you should probably call Bobby and ask him to look into beings named Hastur, because I can’t tell what he is. But before we ruin my new friendship, I’d like to enjoy a free lunch with him.”  Castiel wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t unobservant.  He hadn’t missed Hastur’s obvious malice towards the Winchesters.  He still hoped Hastur had a good side—most non-humans (and, let’s be honest, some humans as well) didn’t take to the Winchesters, especially when they walked into a discussion about how to kill them.  Maybe it was nothing.  Maybe it would be all right, and he hadn’t made an extraordinarily large mistake in trusting the demon with everything.  But just in case… Bobby’s should be the next stop.

After lunch.


	6. Chapter The Fifth: In Which Dean Experiences Pie Related Trauma

It was the most awkward lunch any of them (besides Hastur, because nothing but _nothing_ could top the “company picknick” of 1348, when everyone got food poisoning from eating plague victims—actually, Hastur thought this was going rather well. He was the only one) had ever had. Castiel didn’t have to eat, and usually he wouldn’t, but this situation was his fault (though really, dear reader, we all know it wasn’t—it was Hastur’s) and he needed something to distract him from Dean’s glares, which alternated between him and Hastur.  Sam just looked exasperated, slowly picking away at his salad.  Castiel was having pancakes.  They had an all day breakfast menu at the Prairie Lounge.  The pancakes were blueberry.  He wished Dean would stop glaring at him.

Hastur was enjoying himself, and his excessively rare steak.  Dean’s glares were like the hotsauce on his perfect sundae of a week (or whatever goes on the exciting foods humans eat—do you really think there are enough sundaes in Hell that a demon would understand how they work?  If you did, you were wrong).  He could see secrets and pains and worries floating around his head, buried beneath his skin.  And the angel cared _so much_ about this pieced together man.  It would be a delight to take them both apart until their souls screamed and the angel fell in a burning comet, his grace singeing his damned skin as it sloughed off, his mind fracturing, his… oh. Well, that was a rather inconvenient erection.

Dean was eating a burger (shock) and glaring.  It wasn’t a very good burger.  The lettuce was limp and stuck to the bun, which was soggy in one hemisphere (I was going to say corner, but they’re not at White Castle, geez.  Dean knows geometry terms, sort of).  This day was continuing to disappoint him and make him want to drink.  They should be holed up, figuring out how to gank this demon or god or whatever.  Or they should be charging in blindly, guns blazing, with the intention to kill or at least seriously maim.  They should _not_ be sitting in a restaurant with bad burgers, eating lunch with Cas’s new demon sugar daddy, making plans to somehow entice it to Bobby’s so _maybe_ they could trap it and _maybe_ find something to work on it, or at least find out what the friggin’ Hell it actually wanted.  It smiled too much and it was starting to creep him out.  And, honestly?  He was so used to trying to find the secret bad in people, trying to guess which adorable, innocent child was secretly possessed this time, that seeing something so obviously, hilariously, campishly evil was putting him off.

(Hastur is actually just a guy with a stereotypically thin face and a stereotypical bad guy goatee, in a rather nice grey suit with a yellow shirt that wouldn’t compliment anyone’s skin tone.  The camp thing is more of a vibe.)

Sam was eating a salad.  Honestly, I think this is set sometime in the middle of Season Five, but everyone is so guilty and so sad and Sam’s doing his addicted to demon blood, oh so sad I suck let’s not hunt, oh wait actually yes thing and that’s just fine for the show but what am I doing with him?  I mean, he has to be in the story because he and Dean are so “psychotically, irrationally, erotically co-dependant” on one another (like Shaggy and Scooby.  Thanks Zacariah, now I’m going to bestiality Hell).  But like, he cares because hunting but not as much as Dean because Cas, so.  Sam was eating a salad.  It was fine.  He was happier with it than Dean was with his burger.  He watched Hastur, trying to catch any clues about his intentions or his species, but the only potential clue was the symbol on his tie pin—it looked like it could be a sigil, but it could just as easily be an abstract design.  He pulled out his phone and started texting very obviously.  With luck, the “demon” wouldn’t notice him snapping a picture… Got it.  And sent to Bobby, who they were trying to introduce to more advanced forms of technology, with the note “apparently Cas made friends with a “demon” who’s treating us to lunch.  Cas couldn’t expel him from his host—either lost his mojo or “demon” is lying.  Bringing him to you later, somehow.  Check this symbol, he’s wearing it like a badge.”

When Bobby got the message, he groaned.  Today was definitely not going to go well.  When he saw the attached image, he blanched.  He knew he’d seen it before, and definitely not in a good context.  He wheeled himself over to his bookshelf and scanned the titles until he found what he hoped he had misremembered.  _The King in Yellow_.  A reproduction of the original play, which had, according to the lore, driven everyone who read it mad.  This copy separated the potent text from the unwary reader with page and pages of nothing.  Included at the beginning of the book were helpful, handwritten notes about the general story, notes about incidents thought to be linked to reading this book, and speculations about its creation.  On one page was the symbol he was looking for, unfortunately a near exact match to the image Sam had sent.  The notes around the text declared it to be the Yellow Sign, and warned that this was an inexact replica, intentionally so, as anyone who possessed the sign was liable to be possessed themselves by the King in Yellow, or driven mad by his whisperings, as the sign gave him what amounted to an open phone line to your subconscious.  Bobby quickly texted back—“The King in Yellow.  A Great Old One.  Working on how to kill or trap.  Don’t let him give you anything with that symbol on it—you’ll lose your mind.  My advice—leave quick.  Now.”  As Bobby continued to read, his worry continued to grow.  “Balls,” he swore to the empty room.

“Son of a Bitch!” Dean yelled as he threw down his fork and frantically cleaned his tongue with a napkin, caring naught for the stares of the other patrons of the Prairie Lounge.  Pie had betrayed him.  He had gotten a piece of beautiful looking cherry pie, which the waitress had told him was made fresh this morning.  This pie would make up for everything that had happened today.  This pie would make up for his life if it tasted as good as it looked.  This pie was perfect.  He had taken a piece on his fork, but has he placed it in his mouth, something changed.  It didn’t taste like cherries.  It tasted like blood; sticky, congealing blood, oozing from between crusts the texture of drying flesh.  This was not okay.  This was perhaps the worst sensory experience he had ever had the misfortune to experience.  Now Cas was looking at him like he was nuts and that damned demon was sitting there with that same shit-eating grin on his face.  He did this.  It wasn’t a thing demons did, but it was definitely his fault.  He was about to do something violent when he felt Sam slip his phone into his hand.  He glared down and saw it was a message from Bobby.  Then he read the message.  “Great,” he muttered, passing the phone back to Sam after typing ‘plan?’

Sam passed it back.  ‘Get him to Bobby’s and throw everything at him.  Or run.’  Well that decided it.  Dean Winchester did not run.  And he did not let _anyone_ mess with his pie.

Castiel sat up.  There was a hand on his thigh. 

“I can see why you like him so much.  He’s charm personified,” Hastur said in an undertone.

“He is a good man,” Castiel replied stiffly.  Hastur made a noncommittal noise.  “You disagree?”  Castiel gave Hastur a sidelong look.  “Why?”

“I can see the sin hanging off his shoulders like a cloak.  If it were water and he was standing in an enclosed space, he would drown in it.  Still,” Hastur shrugged, “There’s no accounting for taste.”

“His soul is good.”

“Is it?” Hastur asked with little interest.  He turned his attention back to the young men across the table from him.  “Dean, you’ve not finished your pie.  Was it not to your taste?” He asked with his least sincere smile.

“We have to kill him, Sammy,” Dean said through clenched teeth.

Sam took the initiative.  “Hey, Cas, would you mind stepping outside with me for a second?  I’ve got something personal I needed to ask you but I didn’t get a chance back at the motel.”

Castiel stood abruptly and nodded, striding out of the restaurant.  Sam clapped Dean on the back and followed.  
“Cas, he’s not a demon.  Bobby says he’s something called a “Great Old One,” whatever that is, and the symbol on his tie pin apparently makes people go crazy.  We have to get him to Bobby’s to see if we can contain him somehow, because a lot of people are in danger with him loose.  But we can’t have you pop us there one by one—it would be like the fox, chicken, and grain riddle.”

“I can transport you and Hastur to Bobby’s first, then come back for Dean.”  Castiel glanced back at the restaurant.  “I don’t think it was a good idea to leave them alone together.”

“Dean’s as prepared as any of us, which isn’t saying that much, but he can handle himself for a couple of minutes.  You came out here pretty quickly—what’s changed your mind since we talked at the motel?”

“I still see no reason to kill him—“

“—besides about ten murders—“

“—which I only speculate were caused by him.  But containment is an option.  I’m afraid he has developed an… interest in me that I did not intent to promote.”

Sam raised his eyebrows.  “An ‘interest’?  What sort of interest?”

“He put his hand on my thigh.  It was uncomfortable.”

“Cas, you stand like three inches from people and you think that’s plenty of space.”

“I generally refrain from placing my hands near their genitals.”  He turned and walked back into the restaurant.  “Hastur,” he called, and Hastur turned away from the glaring contest Dean had been having with him.  “We are going somewhere.”  As Sam came up behind him, he reached out to both of them.  Then they were gone, an astonished look on the demon’s face.  Even Dean was surprised he would do that in front of so many people.  Cas reappeared and dropped his hand on Dean’s shoulder.  “Come, Dean.  We must go.”  And they vanished as well.

The patrons of the Prairie Lounge would talk later, and rationalize away what they had seen, some putting it down to bad food, some to lack of sleep, and some to too much time spent on the internet.  Most of them would forget this day within the week.

Bobby Singer would remember it for the rest of his life.


	7. Chapter The Sixth: In Which I Don't Think We're in Kansas Anymore, Toto, and the King in Yellow Is Pretty Pissed About That

Bobby wheeled around and stared at the three figures that had appeared behind him.  Great.  He wasn’t even halfway ready to face a Great Old One.  What were those boys thinking?  Idjits.  They were probably all dead now, but when wasn’t that the case?  Castiel disappeared again, presumably to pick up the other idjit, but maybe to run away from this mess that he’d waded right into the middle of when he was supposed to be looking for God or stopping the impending apocalypse.  He looked at the big bad that was probably going to eviscerate them today.  He looked pretty confused for someone as powerful as the lore claimed he was.  The King in Yellow’s last recorded appearance was sometime in the late 1920s, though there were a few unexplained appearances in the 1950s that could have been him.  Either way, maybe he wasn’t used to new technology.  Or angels.  Having an off-balance Great Old One was probably good.  Or bad.  It wasn’t clear at this point.

Hastur was certainly off-balance, but that wasn’t anything especially new.  He was confused as to how the angel had pulled off that transportation, but maybe Upstairs was getting more lax in the accounts department and the Heavenly Host was being allowed to pull as many miracles out of their collective holy asses as they wanted.  That would be a pain, but it was good to know that now, instead of when it mattered.  Why Castiel thought it was important that he be here… oh, now that was interesting. He focused on the man in the wheelchair that they younger Winchester had gone to as soon as they’d appeared.  This one was important to the Winchesters. And the Winchesters were important to the angel.  And the angel needed to learn the true taste of despair.  As Dean appeared in the room with Castiel beside him, Hastur grinned.  He could practically taste the commendation waiting for him after this one.

Hastur turned and, with a flick of his wrist, locked down the building.  A wave of his hand sent the Winchester boys flying against the walls, trapped under the pressure of the swelling infernal power Hastur could feel building inside of himself.  He had never been this strong before, never had this kind of juice.  The angel was frozen in surprise.  As he stalked towards the man in the wheelchair, the important one, he realized what it was.  Souls.  He had ten souls inside him, living souls, good ones, not the dead and the damned.  Ten souls could power so much and he had eaten them _by accident_ because that wasn’t something just any demon could do.  But it seemed like all of the rules were off, here and now, with angels using miracles to travel rather than their wings and Hastur felt like a _god_.

The man in the wheelchair—Bobby Singer, he read off the top of the man’s mind, though he guarded more than surface material very carefully—was trying to grab a weapon, a shotgun, but it was useless.  The bullets went through Hastur's body harming nothing.  Even the holes in his suit closed with a thought.  He raised his eyebrows and smirked, tasting the fear in the room on his tongue.  He could hear the Winchesters struggling, yelling to him, to Bobby, to Castiel to do something, to try something, to stop him. He reached Bobby and placed a hand on his head, reaching into his mind.  Even the most careful human couldn’t guard their thoughts from him—his specialty was madness, the first and only disease of the mind.  One of the few things humans couldn’t fight, not in the beginning, and not now.  They try. Oh, they do try.  But nothing can halt the slow decline of a mind rotting from the inside out. 

Ah. 

There. 

That was the key. Such delicious guilt.  Hastur latched onto the memory of Bobby’s wife’s death and pulled, bringing it to the front of his mind, and further out. Making it a reality, an inescapable reality playing out again, over and over before his eyes, and behind them, never ending.

Bobby didn’t scream, not like most.  Usually they wailed, making a most enjoyable music from their pain.  If you were talented, you could even dance to it.  No, Bobby broke quietly, as he had always done and would always do.  Quietly and slowly, the guilt becoming a wave of grief, which crashed over the levees of his mind and flooded the conscious levels, burying them beneath the thick black liquid pain.  Hastur had to do very little.  He just handed Bobby the gun and he took care of it himself, pulling the trigger with nary and infernal or external prompt.

Castiel finally moved.  It was unfortunate that he hadn’t done so while Hastur was distracted, because in his diminished state and Hastur’s improved one there was little he could do in a head to head fight.  It took little more than a touch and a surge of power to shut his vessel down, paralyze it after blocking the first and only blow, not made when it might count for something.  Hastur laid Castiel on the ground, his body immovable but his eyes wide open and his mind still active.  As Hastur straddled him and took his face in his hands, sinking his claws into the skin, he let out a laugh.  “Do you know,” Hastur said, looking into Castiel’s eyes and dropping his hold on his human figure just enough to show his true eyes, to let Castiel see _all_ of his intentions, “I’m having Déjà vu.  Though I must say, you are rather more attractive than the last angel I violated.  Now.  What should I do next?  Should I have some fun with you first, or take care of these lovely boys?”  Castiel do nothing to respond, his vessel dying around him and his spirit trapped by Hastur’s power.  “I know.  Why don’t we take a little trip into Sam?”

Hastur carefully turned Castiel’s head so he could see the Winchesters, still trapped against the wall.  As he approached Sam, he released him, and dodged the clumsy punch he threw at his face.  With a dark laugh he allowed Sam to continue.  It had been a while since his last truly physical altercation, and it was very exciting.  Very stimulating.  He danced around the young man, blocking the few strikes he was able to connect.  Then he struck back.  The first punch hit Sam in the face, dislocating his jaw and throwing him off balance.  The next struck his solar plexus, effectively driving all of the air from Sam’s lungs and taking him out of the game.  But you were never really out of Hastur’s game.  A low, sweeping kick knocked Sam’s legs out from under him and he crashed to the floor, trying to curl into a protective posture while he regained his breath and his balance.  It didn’t help.  It couldn’t stop Hastur from grabbing his head and yanking it around so he could trace the Yellow Sign, _his_ sign, on Sam’s forehead with his claws, unlocking him for Hastur’s personal use.  “Go kill your brother for me, would you?” He whispered into Sam’s ear as he released Dean from his hold as well.

Sam staggered up, his jaw cocked unnaturally and blood dripping slowly down his face.  He stalked toward Dean, who didn’t block or dodge the first blow from shock. 

“Sam, snap of it!” Dean yelled, though it didn’t make any difference.  Sam was Hastur’s puppet now, and little else. “Sam! It’s me, Dean, your fucking brother Sammy, stop, argh” a particularly good hit that one, Hastur thought, “Stop it, Sam!”  Dean tried to hold him, to just get him to stop hitting him, but it soon became apparent that that would do little.  Same wouldn’t stop, not even if he were restrained.  He would pull his own body apart to get out and get Dean.  There was no choice.  Dean grabbed a paperweight from Bobby’s desk and smashed it on Sam’s head in a blow that should have knocked him out for a good long while.  It probably cracked his skull, with the noise it made.  Sam staggered, but didn’t fall.  That move only bought Dean a few seconds, though the blood rushing to the wound and Sam’s brain would shortly put an end to the fight if Dean didn’t end it sooner.  “Sammy, Stop!” Dean tried once more.  It was just as useless.  Sam continued to fight him, backhanding him across the face and slamming him into the bookshelf.  Sam wrapped his hands around Dean’s neck, and it was everything Dean had feared would come to pass, but it wasn’t old yellow eyes and it wasn’t Lucifer, it was some elder god from another pantheon that Cas had buddied up with who, surprise, was an evil son of a bitch, and shit, the world was starting to go dark around the edges.  He struggled against Sam’s hold and gave up trying to be gentle, jamming his thumbs into Sam’s eyes and twisting out of his grip as it loosened momentarily.  Dean stumbled backward, away from Sam, his brother, bleeding and beaten by him.  His fault.  As Sam swung blindly at him, he landed another desperate punch and watched his brother fall, try to get up, and fall again.  Dean stood staring as Hastur approached and, with surprising courtesy, snapped Sam’s neck.

“That didn’t last very long at all, did it?  Disappointing.”

Dean was panting and drained.  He couldn’t fight this thing. Not alone.  Not with his brother and Bobby dead and Cas… whatever the Hell this thing had done to Cas.  He was fucked.

Hastur reached out and cupped Dean’s face with his hands.  “Rejoice, for you have been chosen.”  He carved his sign on Dean’s forehead as he had on Sam’s.  “To help me fell this angel.  Go to him.  And take yourself apart in front of him.”  Hastur handed him a knife and Dean, emptied of his will, walked and sat before Castiel’s inert body.  He used all of his knowledge, preciously gained during his time in Hell, to make it last, though it was harder to do this to yourself than someone strapped to a table, just because of the angles and the reach.  And as Dean died, Castiel broke.  His mortal form melted as his essence twisted, changed, and burned.  And Hastur rode his writhing soul straight back to Hell and a renewed lease on existence.

At least, that’s what Hastur imagined would happen as he turned and stepped and flicked his wrist.  What actually happened was nothing of the sort.  As he _tried_ to step forward he found he couldn’t, instead hitting a barrier, invisible but for when he touched it and it sparked under his claws.  He stared at it in befuddlement, flung out of his wonderful daydream and back to what seemed to be a desperately unfair reality.  He saw the Winchester’s watching him carefully, surprised, but not at the invisible power.  He looked up, and found himself staring at the most potent and complicated Devil’s trap he had ever seen, painted on the ceiling directly over his head.

That couldn’t be right.  Those didn’t actually work, not unless they were drawn by saints in blessed lambs’ blood on sacred ground.  They didn’t work when they were drawn rather sloppily in an unappealing shade of red paint by three of the worst sinners Hastur had ever had the misfortune to stumble across.  What was happening here?  First angels with no miracle quotas and now devil’s traps that worked?

Dean cocked his head (how he’d like to twist it right off his neck) and sauntered up to the edge of the trap’s influence.  “Wasn’t sure if this would work.  Glad it does.  How do you feel about holy water?”  As Dean spoke, he pulled out a decorated silver flask, which Hastur did not doubt contained exactly what he claimed.

Hastur’s eyes widened and he backed up, hands held up empty and harmless, eyes never leaving the container the cap of which Dean was slowly unscrewing.  “No.  Don’t—” was all he could get out before he saw the liquid leave the container and come flying through the air towards him.

In that instant he knew real fear again, deep and hidden as it had been.  He thought of Ligur (when did he not? How could he forget that scream, cut off so abruptly? Was there a moment that went by that in the back of his mind he did not mourn and think with shocked gratitude that it had not been him who entered that cursed flat first?) and wondered if it really was as painful a way to go as it looked.  It must have been.  The screams were not as bad as the visual, seeing his corporeal form slough off in sheets of melting flesh, dissolve into an evil smelling liquid which he hoped was devoid of his ~~friend~~ partner’s essence by that point because to be just a pool of nerves feeling nothing but the burn of purity?  That was the definition of torment.  He couldn’t help the undignified noise that escaped his mouth at the first burning touch of the water, nor the flinch that accompanied it.  But he quickly straightened and stared at his hand.  He could feel the burn, and it certainly wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t melting his body and scorching his essence as it should have done.  And this water was _holy_ unlike the sinners that wielded it. Not that it mattered.  Where devil’s traps and those sorts of things failed, the Big Man Upstairs had provided the ultimate protection for humanity in holy water, easily accessible at any church, technically creatable by anyone in need who believed it could be done.  It didn’t just sit on a demon’s skin and burn, it _demolished_ down to the being’s core, erasing them from existence, or severely maiming them to the extent that their very essence would be eternally crippled and in agony if the amount wasn’t sufficient to finish them off.  It didn’t fade to a sting, and then heal.

Then Hastur realized the truth.

This wasn’t his Earth.  He actually had missed when he leapt from Hell into the Void.

It wasn’t that he was stupid.  He had known this would be a possibility when he had chosen that particular escape route.  But it had been so similar, so close he must have missed by precious centimeters.  And he had been distracted, had distracted himself with unnecessary meals, with plans to fell the wrong angel.  Had been distracted by the potential of two felled angels to his name.  Had been distracted by the feeling of relief and freedom so rarely (never) experienced by the denizens of Hell, away from rules, with a purpose but not with a Plan.  And so he had seen all the signs, had noticed everything that was wrong, but hadn’t made the connection.  Until now. It’s hard to miss holy water in your face, when you’re a demon.

The knowledge that he had once again failed was _crushing_.  And so he _raged_.

Hastur let go of all pretense to humanity and in those few seconds of transition he thought he heard Castiel yell “Cover your eyes!  You cannot look on his true form!”  He swelled, stretched, roared, and thrashed, his tentacular appendages beating and writhing against the too small confines of the devil’s trap, creating a light show of sparks that stung his moist and gleaming flesh.  He beat his clawed hands against the sides, against the roof and howled through the gaping maw that stood in place of his mouth, the razor gate of his teeth open wide enough to enclose a human’s head.  The sound and pitch of his screams rattled and broke the windows, and his thrashing made the house and the ground quake, though this did nothing to damage the cursed devil’s trap.

He was a powerful being, and he was upset.  It was throw a tantrum or spontaneously combust.

After a time, his rage subsided, as did his energy.  He reconstructed his human form from the molecules he had thrown off in his fury, shrinking back to the appropriate size.  Exhausted, scrubbed his face with his hands, sighed, and leaned against the barrier, his head resting on his left fist.  He didn’t look up to see the humans’ reactions.  He didn’t care. They didn’t matter.  Or maybe he didn’t matter in this world.  It was wrong, all wrong, and now he was trapped here with them, until they freed him or killed him.  He wasn’t currently sure which possibility he preferred.

Castiel spoke to the Winchesters.  “It’s all right now.  He has taken human form again.  Your eyes will no longer be burned from their sockets and your mind unhinged.”  He turned and addressed Hastur.  “You have significantly more tentacles than I imagined.  I would appreciate it if you no longer pursued me physically, because I do not reciprocate your attraction.”  Hastur huffed out a laugh, but didn’t otherwise reply.

“Didn’t you have a snappy vest earlier?  Where’d that go?” Dean asked, clearly shaken but trying to regain his composure.

Hastur did the same.  Straightening up and straightening the cuffs of his shirt, he replied stiffly, “You try manifesting a body and a full dress suit after the kind of day I’ve had.”

“Out of juice already?  Kind of silly to waste all that energy on the trap when you still have us to deal with.”

“An imp could deal with you without breaking a sweat,” Hastur sneered, though that was likely false in this version of the Earth.

Dean turned and looked at the others. “An imp?” he asked.  Bobby and Sam shrugged.

“Those don’t exist.  Not as separate entities. It’s a misnomer for a lower class of demons that can only possess lower forms of life,” Castiel told Dean.  “And you’re incorrect in that assumption, as Sam and Dean have killed quite a large number of demons,” he explained to Hastur.

“They might not exist here, but they exist where I’m from, and trust me, these boys would be eaten alive there.”

“What do you mean, ‘where you’re from’?” Bobby asked.

Hastur smirked, though he wasn’t happy about his current situation. It always did feel nice to know more than everyone around you. “Gather ‘round, children, it’s story time.  I’m not from this universe.”


	8. Chapter The Seventh: In Which This Is Set During Season Five, So Sam and Dean Don't Know About Alternate Universes Yet

“What.” Dean made a face of deadpan disbelief, before deciding he had to be lying and turning away.  “Whatever.  Sam, go grab some salt, some silver, and some iron. Let’s start checking things off the list.”

“Dean, he might be telling the truth.  Sort of,” Bobby said.  “If he is the King in Yellow and a Great Old One, he doesn’t belong on our plane of existence.  They’re not your normal monsters—they’re from other realms, or maybe cracks in time and space.  The lore isn’t especially clear.”

“We’re still going with that Great Old One idea?  Even though the devil’s trap worked on him?  Shouldn’t that only work on demons?”

“Well, I don’t know, boy, I’ve never fought a Great Old One before. But if you’re such an expert on ‘em, go right ahead and do your little experiments. Oh, but in case I’m right, maybe think about whether or not this devil’s trap that shouldn’t be holding him keeps his powers locked down like it should inside the circle.  Oh wait, it doesn’t, which we know, because he just threw a shit fit and nearly brought the house down and made us all lose our god damn minds! Idjit!”

Dean turned away with a scowl, though Sam went to get the salt, iron, silver, and everything else he could think of anyways.  Dean walked back up to the edge of the barrier.  “Are you a Great Old One or the King in Yellow or whatever?”  There was no harm in asking, right?

Hastur smiled fondly. “I do so love the old names.  I have gone by those titles in the past, yes, though now I introduce myself as a Duke of Hell. I really am only a demon, but not one from your universe, as I believe I tried to say earlier.”

Dean shook his head.  “Demons are just damned souls that have been twisted by Hell.  They come up and possess people.  They don’t have true forms that make people go crazy and they don’t manifest bodies and they can’t do _anything_ but stand around when they walk into a devil’s trap.”

“Perhaps on your world.  Where I’m from, demons are nothing less than fallen angels, and their powers are equivalent to those of their former, haloed brethren.”

“Well, that must be fun for all the humans.”

“There are rather less of us wandering their earth there than I gather there are here.  Downstairs likes to keep us, well, Downstairs. It takes some very special reason to be sent up, unless you happen to snag a gig as a field agent,” Hastur said with a scowl.

Sam walked over to join in the conversation (because lore is basically his thing, even if it’s alternate universe lore).  “What made you think you weren’t in your universe anymore?”

Hastur sighed.  “Well, it was a number of things, many of which I should have put more stock in earlier, but I was distracted.  First, the ability to manifest a body from scratch—that isn’t something I would normally have enough power to do on my usual plane of existence, but I put that down to desperation.  Second, the reaction your angel friend had to my initial appearance.  The angels in my universe are a little more wary of demons than dear Castiel there, and tend not to rush in and commence a laying on of hands,” he gave Castiel a once over glance, just to see his reaction.  Castiel’s responding blush was priceless.  “We’re much more equals, in my world, and we treat the other side with the necessary respect tinged with disdain.  My world’s angels also don’t use their powers as often as you seem to.  They have restrictions on their level of interference with humanity, and tend to be more like observers, if they’re stationed on Earth.”

“I am not stationed on Earth.  I’ve fallen out of Heaven’s favor.”

“Is that why your grace is so ragged? I assumed it was because you were screwing the locals on your tour of duty.”

“I would never—“

“Yeah, no,” Dean butted in.  “He’s pure as the driven snow.  And not for my lack of trying either.”  Everyone turned to stare at Dean, Sam giving him a particularly scrutinizing look.  “As a _wingman_.  I took him to get a hooker when we thought he was going to die trying to trap Raphael.  Not personally trying.  Get your minds out of the gutter people.”  Everyone was still looking at him, but now Sam was trying (not very hard) not to laugh.  “Let’s just move on.”  He turned back to Hastur. “So Cas was your final clue?”

“No, I regret to say I didn’t realize it until I was brought here.  Devil’s traps don’t work, where I’m from, not unless they’ve been made with especially holy ingredients by an especially holy man in an especially holy place. I regret to inform you that none of this was true in your instance.”

“But it held you anyways.”

“Your world, your rules, I suppose.”

“Except you still have the powers you would have on your world,” Sam stated.  “You didn’t turn into a cloud of black smoke or anything when you got here, and you built your own body.”

“Yes, it seems where there are discrepancies, most of the time it’s fallen in my favor.”

“Not for the devil’s trap.”

“Yes, but I’ll take your devil’s trap if your holy water does little more than gently scald.”

“What does holy water do to demons in your universe?  Does it have to be especially blessed by an especially priestly priest under an especially pretty full moon?” Dean asked.

“No,” Hastur’s face darkened.  He wondered if he should say more, but he supposed it didn’t matter.  The universe had already made its ruling, and it wasn’t like they could follow him home.  He didn’t even know if _he_ could get home.  “It can be made by anyone in need who believes.  It is the most potent weapon anyone can use against a demon, besides pure heavenly grace and might.  It melts a demon’s corporeal form and destroys his essence, wiping him from existence.”  He turned to address Castiel.  “That’s what happened to my partner.”

“So that’s why you freaked out like a little girl when I threw it at you,” Dean said with an irritating smile.  “Good to know.”

“What I want to know is, if you aren’t from this universe, why are you in our lore?”  Bobby asked.  “And how did your play get here?”

“Good question,” Dean said, having decided he was the official intermediary or something.  “Well, your majesty? Why are you in our books?”  He paused and turned to Bobby.  “Wait, did you say his _play_?  As in, actors running around on a stage, no special effects and lame costumes sort of play?”

Bobby held up a leather bound book with an unadorned cover.  “Yeah, this.  It’s called _The King in Yellow_ and apparently it makes people crazy if they read it, just like his magic tie pin.  I didn’t test it out personally mind you, but the notes are pretty convincing.”

Hastur looked hungrily at the book.  “I’ve been looking for that.  I thought I’d thrown it away.”

Dean put his face in his hands.  “If it turns out our universe exists at the bottom of a garbage can in another universe’s Hell, I won’t be surprised, but I will quit.”

“Quit what?” Sam asked.

“Everything. Drinking.  Life.  Hunting. Pie.  Everything.”

“There was a time during my feckless youth, before both sides tightened up the rules on who was allowed out after dark, when I wandered with a rather pantheistic crowd.  I may have gone universe hopping with Loki a few times.  I had a brief fling with a muse, and afterwards inspired a mortal to pen a play about me.  He went mad, which was lovely.  It sold extraordinarily well after that.  Humans are so drawn to that which can destroy them.  Of course, it helped that I made him place my sign in the text.”  He touched his tie pin with a fond smile.  “I did so enjoy those possessions, all those people killing and dying in my name, for a kingdom that didn’t exist.”

“That still doesn’t explain why it’s here and not in your universe.”

“I assumed I’d inspired it in my universe, but I may have done it here.  When you’re taking the Grand Tour, you don’t always stop to see where you’re grabbing lunch.”

“Or killing indiscriminately. I get it.” Dean said sarcastically.  “I’m sure you were distracted.”

Hastur smiled with too many, too sharp teeth. “You have no idea.  I took a copy with me and dropped it somewhere. I thought in Hell, _my_ Hell, I assume you have your own and I assume it’s dreadfully boring, but I may have dropped it here.  Or inspired it here and dropped the copy in my world. I haven’t seen one since, oh, must be 1922.  You simply don’t know how gratifying it is to see a copy is still extant.”

“I’m sure it’s lovely,” Bobby said rolling his eyes.  “What you haven’t explained is why you’re here _now_.  I assume it’s not another grand tour.”

“No, this was an accident.  I’ve…fallen out of Hell’s favor recently.  There was a failed apocalypse, several accidental miracles, an attempt to…save…an angel to prevent the promotion of that snake, Crowley.  I was brought home for…reeducation.  I didn’t appreciate it.  I thought I could use the Void to escape to my Earth, but I misjudged the distance and accidentally broke into yours.”

Sam looked excited.  “Your world averted the apocalypse?  How?”

Hastur sneered.  “Our antichrist was misplaced and raised human, without any demonic or heavenly influences, and he decided he liked the Earth as it was, instead of trembling before his feet.”

Sam’s face fell. That certainly wouldn’t work in their case.

Castiel spoke up.  “Did you say Crowley?  The King of the Crossroads?”

Hastur’s temper and nostril’s flared.  “Crowley is a little snake that’s been coasting on his one big achievement since the creation of this universe. If he’s found out how to universe jump I will, as Dean so succinctly put it, quit everything.  But not before I eviscerate him with my bare hands and feed his screaming essence to the furies,” he hissed through clenched teeth.  His rage was palpable.  Even Dean backed up and held up his hands.

“Hey, it’s probably a coincidence.”  They didn’t need a demon-on-demon showdown right now.  “I bet they’re completely different.  Ours is a short Irish guy—he’s definitely a twisted soul and not a fallen angel.”

Hastur calmed somewhat, though he was disappointed in himself for his outburst.  He was moving past this.  He was not obsessed over that little snake anymore. He was a healthy individual with interests appropriate to a demon of his station.  He was not obsessed.  He wasn’t.  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath counting to ten.

“Was it Crowley who killed your partner?” Castiel asked, absolutely ruining Hastur’s returning calm.

“That’s none of your business you half-fallen twat!”  Hastur’s eyes blacked out as he lost some of his control on his form.  He smashed a fist against the barrier, creating an uncomfortable ripple of light.

“Hey, hey, it’s fine,” Sam said, trying to retake control of the situation.  “Nobody’s talking about that.  We’re talking about something else.  Like, how to send you back to your universe. How do you feel about that?  Do you want to go back?”

Hastur looked up, his eyes returning to normal. “Finally, an intelligent question.”


	9. Chapter The Eight: In Which Nobody Knows How to Do This Without Shattering Existence

“I would very much enjoy getting back to my universe, if I can get to its Earth.  If the only way to get back is through Hell, well, I think maybe I’ll look for a nice timeshare here.”

No one looked very pleased with this statement.

“How, specifically, did you get here?  Can you just do that again, but with better directions?”  Bobby asked, not very hopefully.

“I clawed a very small hole in the fabric of Hell’s existential plane and leapt into the void between worlds, latched onto a crack in what I believed was my universe’s Earth’s existential plane, and forced my way through that.  But it wasn’t my universe’s Earth, and I tried this with the best directions you can have in the void.  It’s all guesswork if you don’t have a well-travelled guide, and there are very few who are well-travelled in the void.  Loki’s the only one who comes to mind, but I imagine he’s unavailable.  I have no idea where your universe is in comparison to mine, nor where and how your various planes line up, or even if you have the same number of them.  It would very difficult and very unlikely to work, and I’d really rather not try diving into the void again—there are, shocking I know, universes even I would rather not end up in.  I believe there’s one where everything is made of shrimp.”

“What, everything?” Dean asked with inappropriate interest, given the situation.  “Even the people?  Or are the people just really big shrimp?”

Hastur cooly raised an eyebrow.  “I haven’t personally been, so I’m sure I don’t know.  My point, which you seemed to have missed, is that it would be extremely difficult with a very low likelyhood of success and I would rather not try that again if there are other options available.  _Any_ other options.”

“Why did you try that in the first place?  Couldn’t you find another way out of Hell?” Sam asked.

“At the time, it seemed like the best option, and the least likely to result in my immediate recapture.  It looks like I was perfectly justified in assuming the latter point.”

“What you did is very damaging to the structural integrity of both universes.  How large a hole did you create?” asked Castiel, who was presumably the only one with enough knowledge about universe building to legitimately ask this question and not have it seem disgustingly out of character.

“Not an especially large one. If I started the slow collapse of my own universe, don’t you think someone would notice?  I was going for stealth, not wanton destruction, as enjoyable as that always is.  It was no bigger than my current form’s hand, and not all of that was from me.  Most universes have a rather thrown together look when you see them from the outside, and life shines through the cracks like beacons of light.  I managed to find an already rather large crack and just widened it a little.  As Castiel vaguely hinted, I’m rather octopoidal in my true form—I don’t need a lot of space.”

“If you won’t go back the way you came, what do you suggest?  How else can someone travel between different universes?”

“There are cases where powerful enough beings have been able to do so using a strong, modified transportation spell, if you’ve got spells that work on your universe, that is.  I’ve never been one to rely on other’s magic, but something of this magnitude needs strong directional underpinnings to prevent the entity being transported from ending up everywhere or nowhere.  I wouldn’t dare just attempt to miracle myself back home without a very strong supportive framework.”

“We have plenty of magic—it’s just mostly evil,” Dean said.  “And did you say ‘miracle’?  Demons don’t do miracles.”

“I have no qualms about using evil magic. It’s actually my favorite kind, if it’s well constructed.  And yes, I did say ‘miracle.’  It’s not technically accurate, but it’s the only word in the English language that comes close to explaining what I mean.  Don’t fault me for a language which only has one word for ‘an event attributed to a supernatural cause,’ that’s your sloppy language making.”

“Right, fine.  We’ll hit the books, see how many transportation spells we can scare up and compare them for accuracy and strength,” Sam said, already unbearably tired of Hastur’s presence.  “Come on Dean.  You get to help.  Cas, you can keep an eye on our guest, unless you know somewhere else to look for a spell like this.”

Castiel nodded and disappeared, presumably to go search the lost books from the library of Alexandria or a medieval ruins or something very exotic and exciting for a book of spells more powerful than those Bobby possessed.  Sam, Dean, and Bobby began collecting any books they could find which might have such a spell.  And Hastur was left alone to contemplate his predicament.

Now, you may be wondering, dear reader, ‘what’s up with Hastur?  Why is he being a wuss about the void now?  Why is he asking the Winchesters for help (or at least, letting them offer to help)?  This is not the Hastur I have come to expect from previous fanfics and also his _Good Omens_ canon. Why, in fact, have you basically ruined him?’ To this valid line of questioning, I reply, ‘Shut up.’  No, wait.  That’s not very mature.  Sorry.  ‘Hey, remember when I said this Hastur plays the long game?  Yeah, he’s biding his time, because he’s stuck in a devil’s trap and he’s pretty stuck.  Let’s check back in on him for a minute.’

Hastur paced the circumference of the circle slowly, dragging his claws against the barrier, watching the patterns of light and sparks, testing for any weakness, looking for a break in the pattern that might indicate a sloppy sigil he could exploit, an area of paint not as complete as the others, anything that might give him enough wiggle room to pull something, break out or slip out (he wasn’t lying when he said he didn’t need a lot of space).

He certainly didn’t plan to be still in this trap by the time they found a suitable spell.  He didn’t need their help to escape—he could comb through this whole world’s magical history in a week if he put a little infernal energy into the endeavor.  He didn’t plan to leave this world with the Winchesters still alive.  He hadn’t made up his mind about the angel yet.  If he felled an angel here, it would do absolutely no good for his reputation back home.  There wasn’t exactly an open trade route between alternate universes, and if he tried to argue for some sort of credit he’d be laughed out of the office and right back into the pits of torment.  No, it wouldn’t help _that_ situation.  But it might make him feel better.  But if that was all, he might as well just kill him along with the humans (or…inconveniently discorporate him, since he seemed to be possessing a human vessel like a low level demon.  Really, what shoddy supernatural entities this universe had).  He decided.  He’d escape, place nice (but not nice enough that he got tricked into another trap), kill them after they told him all they had found in terms of spells (no sense in doing research twice, Hastur can be practical sometimes), kill the angel, and if no better spells could be located, set up shop here.  He could be the King in Yellow again, take human’s minds as his playthings, destroy anyone who tried to get in his way (human or demon) with no repercussions from superiors…it actually sounded rather appealing.

Still, as much as he tried to convince himself he was over Crowley’s betrayal of all demon kind and Ligur’s death, he knew, at the bottom of his nonexistent heart, that he was obsessed, and if he could get back to his Earth and enact his plan of vengeance and reasserted dominance in his Hell, he would.  So he kept pacing and testing and waiting for his chance.

(See?  He’s totally evil still, with plans and everything.  I hope you’re happier now, reader, because I started this section at like six o’clock in the morning, just for you.  Well, mostly to get it out of the way because I have no idea what I’m doing anymore, but still.  Six o’clock. You be clever and evil at six.  What’s that?  ‘Evil never sleeps,’ you say?  Well I say ‘Shut up, my darling, little cherub, it probably takes naps sometimes and nobody like six o’clock in the morning.  Not nobody, not no how.)

Sam and Dean found Hastur’s pacing and light show rather distracting, and they hoped Castiel would be back soon, because while they assumed the regular stuff would work to at least slow Hastur down if he somehow got out (and the longer they thought about what he’d said, the more likely they thought it was that he could do so), they couldn’t really gank him, and they couldn’t exorcize him, and Cas was probably the only one strong enough to slow him down if he managed to escape.  Also, while the barrier created by the devil’s trap wasn’t actually a physical thing, the movement in the powerful molecules created by Hastur’s claws jostling them as he paced created a sound just below the level of a human’s ability to consciously hear and register as noise.  It made everyone very uncomfortable somewhere deep in the pit of their stomachs and the back of their brains.

Though, when Hastur _did_ stop pacing, and sat in the middle of the circle with his eyes closed and his hands clasped, they got rather worried.  Their worry quickly escalated when his form seemed to ripple, and vaguely tentacle like shapes seemed to appear, coming from…somewhere…it was hard to look at them, like they weren’t really there, a reflection of a reflection in a pool of rippling water; it hurt the eyes and the mind.  When Hastur started to probe the edges of the barrier with these awful, unseeable limbs, all of them wanted to go over and do something, stop him somehow (how small a space would he need in the devil’s trap to get out?  Other demon’s just needed the circle broken, but were there cracks in the power that humans couldn’t see?  Was it really possible that this…thing could escape?) but none of them could force themselves to approach, their very biology screaming at them to keep back, to run, to turn away, to close their eyes and their minds to the monstrous impossibility of the creature in their invisible cage.  They all wished at once that they could see the barrier, see something physical between themselves and the writhing wriggling half-invisible worms filling the floor and nosing up on nothingness.

And just as suddenly as Hastur had begun this awful experiment he stopped, opening his eyes wide in surprise, as Castiel appeared before them.  He had felt the rush of power that accompanied the appearance this time, not being sucked up and a part of it himself, and he was shocked that so much power was at the disposal of one so far from Heaven’s favor, to be casually used for transportation, and that the angel himself saw this as diminishment.  He began to rethink his idea of setting up shop here, if there were angels like this, ready and willing to throw down for the earth (or its destruction, because why buy a house in an earthquake zone during the middle of a quake off the Richter scale?).

Castiel looked down on Hastur. “I have found the spell which you seek.”


	10. Chapter The Ninth: In Which Surprise Attack Because Plot

Here’s the thing.  Hastur’s power—otherworldly, extraworldly, different—is like a beacon.  No, scratch that, not a beacon, beacon’s are bright, they evoke images of lighthouses, Bat-Signals, help and safety.  Hastur’s power is like a tar pit, a black hole, a perverted specter’s hand sliding sensuously up your cerebellum.  Until now, besides his initial burst, which was noticed, pondered by demons and monsters in the area with hilariously cocked heads like little dogs, and then dismissed as a fluke or as the Winchesters doing something especially stupid—besides, with the apocalypse still a-rollin’ onward, a little power fluctuation was hardly unexpected, maybe just Lucifer flexing his muscles, though no one knew angels could feel like that hot dark mess.  It was the tantrum that did it (it usually was, but it’s hard to remain mature and stoic when you were created to be a secondary, humorous villain, just one part of Those Two Bad Guys, now sadly separated and what do you do when your very purpose, your definition, is broken from the outside by someone you’ve never respected in the slightest, besides grow a dangerous obsession that ruins you and develop a tendency towards throwing tantrums like a human child, but with—potentially—more ooze?).  The abrupt release of his power in morphing to his true form and the slow release maintained by continuing to manipulate reality and his molecules to keep the humans sane enough to find the necessary spell, but still use the right form for the task of escaping, that’s what did it.  This inky sticky swelling had attracted all the wrong sort of attention, for though Hastur was stuck in this tube of power (like the adorable octopus in the aquarium that he isn’t) his power was not, and it leaked out like piss through a sieve.

And so it was that as Castiel, angel of the Lord (probably) appeared before the Winchesters (and Bobby) to impart the knowledge he had gained from his (admittedly short and off-page) quest for the magical spell that would (hopefully) send their unwanted “demon” acquirement back to his own world for good without having to punch holes in the fabric of the universe, a whole fuckton of demons also decided to drop by.

Well, perhaps “fuckton” is the wrong word.  That sends the wrong message, I think.  There were just a few demons who got a little curious about what was going on that could cause such a surge of strange and, frankly, disgusting feeling power (though who are they to judge?).  So they had begun to show up, one by one, circling Bobby’s house, looking both of a way in and a clue about what they might find if they entered, because demons don’t really enjoy being sent back to Hell, even temporarily. It’s kind of a pain.  But as the number of curious demons grew, the more confident each individual felt about living through a potential storming of the house to find, and maybe capture for personal use and gain, the interesting new power source or entity that the Winchesters had dug up.  It wasn’t that they trusted each other, and planned some sort of coordinated attack.  No, each one’s thoughts were running something along the line of, ‘If there are this many of us to distract the Winchesters, they will be so busy killing everyone else that they won’t notice me’ (the more hopeful and overconfident ones substituted “being killed” for “killing everyone else” but you get the general picture).

Bobby’s house is heavily fortified, but it currently lacks salt lines at the main doorways, because no attack is expected and they receive enough traffic that it would be an exercise in futility to keep an unbroken line there.  By the time Castiel returned, there were at least twenty demons outside the house, and several more on the way, all drawn by their inescapable curiosity.  And you know what they say about curiosity.

When they angel appeared, they felt it and most of them wondered (privately) if they had missed their chance, if they shouldn’t have stormed in while he was gone, but then someone said they had heard a rumor that a week ago the angel had been seen in Faith trying to banish a demon and had failed, so maybe he’d fallen to Earth (none of them would have been surprised), or at least out of Heaven’s favor, and maybe he wouldn’t be too much of a problem.  None of them stopped to wonder why the angel would still be around if he’d gone against a demon without powers and still walked away, what that might mean for them, because demons are greedy and a little impulsive (that’s what ended most of them in Hell anyways) and so they figured they might as well start a fight with the angel there, take him down too, get some extra respect, some bragging rights.

So they charged.  It wasn’t especially organized, because they had no leader, not like under Lilith, but it was still twenty more demons than were expected at this party.  Man, demons.  Never RSVP.  Tisk tisk.

Sam and Dean quickly armed themselves as the first of the demons came crashing through the door, Dean with The Knife (tm) and Sam with the salt they had brought out in case they had had to torture Hastur with it.  Castiel took point position.

(Let’s just take a moment here, real quick, to let you know that I don’t know how to write fight scenes.  You know Prussia from _Hetalia_ and how inept he's portrayed at being at fighting video games or MMORPGS or whatever even though he has like a blillion years of battle experience and should honestly be a little better at this?  Yeah, that’s me, but with writing fight scenes and experience reading and watching them.  Okay.  As long as we’re on the same page.)

Castiel, even in his diminished state, was able to send the first demon back to Hell with no problem, which would have given some of the others pause if there had been less of them or if they had all been paying attention.  Still, twenty was a lot and banishing demons took some juice even if it was sort of what angels did in their sleep (which they don’t do, so…yeah, I’m a little drunk too, so bear with me).  Dean managed to stab the following demon, currently wearing a woman in her early fifties, in the chest, and watched the sparks dies out before yanking the blade back out and turning.  Sam was playing defense while Bobby wheeled himself over to the rifle stocked with salt filled shells.  They were a good team, but they had been taken a bit by surprise and this was a lot of demons to face at once.  It seemed like they kept coming, but that’s mostly because some of them had circled around to the back door and found it mercifully (unfortunately?) salt-line free.

Two demons, a lovely young lady of around twenty-three sporting a summery, flower patterned dress and an older Asian man wearing a rather nice suit, were circling Hastur in his devil’s trap.  They were rather confused, and were doing that possessed, little dog head cocking thing.  This didn’t look like a power source, nor did it look like a demon, but it was trapped in a devil’s trap, which meant they couldn’t get it. Yet.

Hastur stared back at them, lips curling in disgust, while the others fought for their lives.  He didn’t particularly care if the Winchesters died, that would be fine, but Castiel had the spell he needed, presumably in his head and he would really like to have that before Castiel died or was discorporated.  He wasn’t quite sure what these “demons” were able to do to angels, though he assumed it wasn’t much because they smelled _weak_.  Little better than imps. He sneered at them, and at the Winchesters who were having such a ridiculously hard time eradicating these _pests_.  What a joke.  He was shocked holy water didn’t disintegrate them at the first drop.  Although, if this was as bad as they got perhaps it was no wonder this universe’s creator decided humanity didn’t need a strong defense against them.  _Vermin_.

“You know,” he said, as Castiel stumbled back before him, trying to get his hand on the head of the demon he was fighting so he could drive it out, “I could help.”  After Castiel successfully exorcized that demon, he took a precious moment to stare at Hastur and decide if it was worth it to let him out.  Seeing how Sam, Dean, and Bobby were struggling with only one knife between them, and how Bobby was backed against one of the book cases with just a shotgun and dwindling ammo, seeing the demons who seemed to keep coming, whose numbers were still too high, decided to risk it.  He had bought him pancakes after all.  How bad could he be?

Castiel gestured and a crack appeared on the ceiling, breaking the devil’s trap and setting Hastur free.  Hastur grinned with diabolic delight.  This was more like it.  He glanced back at Castiel in the moment before the two demons who had been circling him could make up their mind about their next move and said, “You might want to tell your toys to close their eyes again.  This could get messy and I’d like it if they were sane enough to perform my spell when we’re done with this distraction.”

Dean, Sam, and Bobby missed this exchange, engaged as they were in fighting for their lives.  Sam was doing his best with the salt, until it ran out.  Then it was down to guns that wounded but didn’t kill, and what holy water was on hand (not as much as there would have been if Dean hadn’t started experimenting on Hastur, but who can blame that, and it was important for moving the plot along, so I think we forgive him).  Bobby was shooting and reloading, as calmly as he could, defending his increasingly perilous position.  His house just wasn’t made for battles, in terms of layout and in ease of clean up.  If he lived through this, he was making that angel magic this mess away, because he definitely wasn’t dealing with it. 

Dean, lovely, darling boy that he is, had dropped The Knife after demon number three.  One of them had snuck behind him, striking his arm just right to break his concentration and his hold on the most important weapon.  Luckily, he had evaded the next strike, which would have knocked him out or broken his arm, depending on where it hit.  He was striking back, trying to get enough room to dive for The Knife, when he heard the crack.  He looked over to where Cas stood, with five bodies lying around him, and then at the devil’s trap, which no longer appeared to be whole.  ‘Great,’ Dean thought as he narrowly avoided another blow to the head from the demon he was currently fighting, ‘just what we need.  Let the main boss out before we finish with the minis.’

He managed to reach The Knife at the last moment, throwing himself down and flinging his arm out, his fingers wrapping themselves around the hilt as he rolled to avoid a blow from, oh good, a different demon.  He swung his arm up, catching the opportunist in the jaw with the blade and impaling the first demon in the skull.  He heard Cas yell “Close your eyes!” just as the sparks in the demon’s eyes went out.  He dived to the side, avoiding the opportunist, and assumed the tornado drill position, protecting himself as much as possible and hoping, praying (to God or Cas is up for speculation) that the King in Yellow or the Duke of Hell or whatever he was thought he needed them.  If not, this was going to be a very short fight and they should probably be running.

Hastur smiled at the two demons who had finally decided to take up a flanking position and try to get their hands on him so they could see what he actually was.  He let go of his form for the second time that day, though this time it was less of a waste of energy because he planned to _devour_ these wretches, souls and all (these “demons” were only souls, weren’t they?) and that should be just the refreshing top-up he needed.  As he swelled, more impressive this time, not being contained in a tube of protective mysticism, he let his tentacle appendages spread, seeking the stains in the universe that were this world’s demons.  They felt like candy made of tar and smoke, dark, attractive, and mildly distasteful.  This could be quick, if he wanted.  But his plans had already been foiled once, he was frustrated with the cosmos which seemed to have it in for him, and he felt like blowing off a little steam.  He could have turned into a swarm of maggots, covered everything (including the humans, what a laugh that would be even if he didn’t eat them.  Their faces afterwards would likely bring him sadistic joy for years to come) devouring the demons and their vessels, no muss (not much muss, anyways.  He just didn’t have the stomach for bones) no fuss.  But he didn’t.  They thought he was the King in Yellow?  He’d give them a King to look up to.  One of his tentacular appendages wrapped around the demon that had been prepared to give Dean a blow which would have broken his unprotected back, lifting it into the air as it screamed, shock leaving it helpless, not fighting the inexorable pull of the monster (yes, monster, to these pests.  They were nothing compared to him), its once human soul screaming in rebellion at what its damned eyes were seeing.  He laughed, bone-shakingly deep and twisted, and every living and damned soul that heard shuddered.  He smashed the demon against the wall, once, twice, until it hung limp in his grasp.  Then he opened his mouth and swallowed it whole.  The other demons were still for a moment, a bird under a snake’s glare, a rabbit before an owl.  It didn’t matter.  Even if they had run, they couldn’t have made it past the writhing mass of tentacles that covered the floor, blocked the doors, and trapped them inside with the worst nightmare they never knew they had.

Hastur continued to feast.  It didn’t take long, but the screams were terrible, and penetrated the inadequate cover a hand over the ear provided for the three humans.  Castiel simply stood, transfixed and rather disgusted, as Hastur snatched, smashed, and ate.  One of the demons, poor bastard, Hastur picked up with his more human appendages and ripped to pieces while it was still alive and conscious.  Demons don’t have mothers to tell them to stop playing with their food, and they wouldn’t listen if they did.  Hastur even ate the already dead ones—there was no sense in wasting good meat, and he knew they were recently killed.  It wasn’t like he was scavenging.

Eventually, there was just one demon left.  This one, Hastur let live, as a warning to the others (because he knew there were others, just as he knew he was the reason they had massed.  He had felt them arriving, one by one, little smears of muck on the horizon).  He didn’t want another interruption like this to ruin his way out of this world.  He picked up the cowering demon, wearing a middle-aged, balding business man, and stroked an appendage gently down its face.  Then he set it on the ground and leaned down until his awful face was inches away from its, and whispered, “Run.”

It did.

Hastur straightened and stretched, feeling energized, but a little sick. Oh yes, the bones.  That’s why he rarely ate in this form—the maggots were so much more efficient.  With an internal sigh, he turned, opened his mouth, and retched.  A stream of polished bone erupted from his gaping maw, piling up on the floor, all that was left of the impromptu demon army.  Wiping his mouth, he turned and gave Castiel his most charming smile, which, in this form, nearly made Castiel jump out of his vessel and run.  “Thanks, darling.  I needed that.”  His voice shook the walls.  The faintly disturbed look on Castiel’s face would stay there for a week.

Hastur knew play time was over, so, with an internal sigh, he once more reformed his human guise, this time with the dress suit intact.  Twelve demon souls and a couple of human corpses really rejuvenated an entity.

“All right children, I’m decent.  You can all open your eyes,” he drawled.  He stood at the edge of the now useless devil’s trap, arms clasped behind his back, looking as non-threatening as he could.  He didn’t need them running off now, not right after he’d saved them so they could perform his spell.

“You…will never be decent,” said Castiel, still trying to reconcile what he had just seen with the entity he had…well, let’s face it…cuddled with, drunkenly, and poured out his problems and deepest secrets to in Faith.  He felt like he needed a shower.  A really long one.  Maybe with bleach.

“Now, now.  Let’s not get nasty, Castiel.  I just saved your precious pets’ lives.  We can’t help what we look like, can we?  We were all created by Another, after all.  Sam, Dean, Bobby!  How nice to see you all survived.”  He smiled pleasantly.

They looked between the pile of bones and Hastur, looking faintly green.

“Did you…eat our kills?” Sam asked.

“Dude, did I feel your…tentacle or whatever, on my leg?  Because the answer better be no,” Dean said, looking as if he, too, would like to take a shower.

Bobby was just glad that the mess was apparently now contained to one pile of bones.

“Neither of those questions are things you should be worried about.  Right now, I’d really appreciate it if, in return for saving your worthless lives, you might get to work on my transportation spell.”


	11. Chapter The Tenth: In Which Things Are Looking Up, Looking Down

What Castiel had found was not, precisely, a spell of transportation.  It was actually a more formal version of what Hastur had done on his own, a way to open a door between dimensions or universes, theoretically more directed and focused than clawing through the fabric of a world and leaping blindly into the Void, but more dependent on wording and ingredients than one’s own strength, intuition, and sense of direction. Hastur was not enormously pleased with this, but he had begun to realize that he had no idea how this universe’s passage of time lined up with his own, and every minute here was being wasted on his Earth in potentially devastating ratios, giving the demons of his world more time to realize he was gone and be ready for him when he finally got back there.  He had been counting on surprise as his greatest ally when he finally got through and caught up with Crowley and his angel, but if he stepped through this door and right into the claws of Hell’s police, the resulting scene wouldn’t be pretty.

So even with his misgivings and complaints, he agreed that this was the best they were going to get on such short notice for such a complicated request.  The rest of them didn’t care quite so much; if Hastur could be sent anywhere that wasn’t here, it would be considered a generally good outcome.  Maybe some poor bastards in another universe would be eaten by a terrifying tentacle monster, but that was their problem, not the Winchesters.  Not this time.

The ingredients were complicated (of course), but Castiel had collected some of them from the same place he had gotten the spell.  I suppose you might want to hear about that, huh, since it happened off-page and might be important?  Well, he had travelled to the lost library of Alexandria and quickly skimmed a couple thousand ancient texts until he found one that mentioned a specific group of monks that were supposedly responsible for keeping creatures from dark dimensions from sneaking into our universe and devouring the life and light that lay within.  He flitted (or whatever angels do when they disappear) to their last recorded monastery, which was, of course, a pile of rubble, but with signs the intelligent and observant could read indicating, basically, a forwarding address.  Following this trail of clues (sort of _Angels and Demons_ / _Davinci Code_ style, but with less action and sexual tension and in a one paragraph as opposed to a whole book), he eventually found the new dwelling of the monks, who now called themselves the Guardians or something, he didn’t remember and it wasn’t important.  After explaining who he was and how he had simply appeared in their midst (which, being what they were and what they guarded against, they, unsurprisingly, didn’t appreciate), they were still hesitant.  They had plenty of spells for _preventing_ the opening of doorways to other realms and dimensions, because that was kind of their thing and kind of the point, but once they were made to understand that there was already a being of the type they liked to keep out wandering the world, laying waste to its people and devouring their life and light (true, it was only ten people at the moment, and would only rise to include twelve demons, and eight corpses, but still) they were more willing to deal.

The spell Castiel obtained was a translation of a remix of a closing spell, with the tacked on option of directionality (most closing spells are either extraordinarily specific—to seal the portal to Thrice Accused Leng, for example—or unhelpfully vague, intended to seal whatever supernatural doorway you happened to point it at, neither of which was helpful in this case as they wanted access to a specific world, or at least to be able to claim that they were achieving access to a specific world).  It seemed a bit cobbled together, to be honest, but if it worked, even sort of, it was better than nothing. Castiel’s fellow feeling for Hastur had nearly disintegrated at this point, and would be completely gone by the time they attempted the casting, so it was more than good enough for his purposes.

After all of the ingredients were gathered from the various corners of the globe at which they could be locally found, there was still the matter of inputting the destination.  This was a bit complicated, for two reasons.  First, it is much easier to direct a multi-dimensional portal through time, space, and the fabric of the universe if you know the name of your destination.  The true name, not just “this guy’s Earth.”  Everything has a true name, even if sometimes that name seems silly, like The Dreamlands.  Whatever.  Eventually you run out of cool sounding names when you are naming everything in existence in every possible future and reality.  Don’t judge.  Anyways, it would have been helpful if they had its true name, but beings rarely know the true name of their universe, much less the specific plane on which they live.  Imagine asking a frog what county he lived in—that’s approximately the same concept, except only sort of and not actually at all.  Second, it would have been helpful if the spell hadn’t had to be translated from its original, ridiculously dead language (the language they needed to cast it in, for it to have any effect) to English, just so they could see where they needed to input their specific directions, and then try to translate these back, with the proper grammar and declensions and whatever else language has, in order to actually use it.  Castiel was doing his best, but not having a clear answer to complication number one didn’t help very much.

So they were trying to jerry-rig an already collage-like spell to accept an alternate form of identification in terms of destination.  This would definitely work.  I would make some sort of amusing comparison to computer coding, and trying to code something in html and translate it to something and then attach directions in wing dings or something, but I don’t actually know anything about computer coding.  So perhaps: it was like trying to get this writer to code something in computer, but with all of the directions in untranslated, improperly declined Latin, using a computer that was on fire.  That’s pretty close.  It’s definitely going to work.  Don’t worry.

Or it _would_ _have_ had the chance to work if Hastur wasn’t refusing to try their alternate destination identification method.

“All we need is a little blood.  Or a feather, or a finger, or a friggin’ tentacle.  It doesn’t matter, whatever you want.  But it has to be something with your…what the hell is it again?”

“Unique dimensional tracking signature,” Castiel replied to Dean without looking over at the two who were back to glaring at each other intently.  “You aren’t meant to be in this universe and it knows that.  The spell will recognize it as well, and will find and lock onto the same signature when it opens the gateway.  It is the only way to make this work, if you want to leave today and not spend the next hundred years seeking an alternate route out or the true name of your universe, which is unlikely to be recorded anywhere in this one.  You are stuck unless you comply with Dean’s request.”

Hastur was unconvinced and unhappy.  “If I give you my blood, you have no reason to continue this spell—you could simply bind me somewhere on this wretched plane and leave me to rot.  I won’t give you that much power over me.  And besides that, even if you didn’t betray me, there is no reason that using my blood will allow you to open the gateway into my _Earth_. It would lock onto my _Hell_ and I would end up back where I started with nothing to show for it but a week of intense frustration,” he hissed through clenched teeth.

“We aren’t the bad guys here, if you haven’t noticed.  We’ve been doing our best to help you get out of here,” Sam tried to reason with him.

Hastur turned his least impressed look on the younger Winchester.  “‘Good’ is not ‘nice.’  You would have tortured me earlier to find out what I was, if I hadn’t told you.  You would have killed me if you hadn’t found out you couldn’t.  You would be fighting me right now if I wasn’t so much more powerful a being than you have ever before seen.  You help me out of fear, not out of the goodness of your sinful, spiteful hearts.  You don’t care where I end up.  Not one of you,” Hastur’s gaze rested briefly on Castiel, but that ship had sailed the minute his true form had been revealed and it wasn’t worth the effort at this point to try to drag it back.

“Well, you got us.  We don’t care about you.  Shocking.  But this is your best, and possibly only chance to leave.  Are you going to take it or not?  Because if the answer is no, you had best go, find yourself a nice little uninhabited corner of Canada to hide in, and not bother anyone, because if you leave any way but through this gateway, know that we’re going to find out how to kill Cthulhu and we’ll come after you,” Bobby said, the voice of gruff practicality, as usual.

As much as Hastur was loath to admit it, Bobby was right (he always was, always).  This was likely to be his best chance, and he didn’t want to waste any more time.  With an unhappy expression, he rolled up his left sleeve and drew his clawed thumb across this wrist, letting his blood drip into the bowl Dean held for him.  When enough had been collected, he licked his wrist closed and pulled his sleeve back down to cover his unmarked wrist.  “Get on with it then.  Let’s all move past this frankly awful chapter in our lives.”

Dean snorted.  “Dude, sorry to disappoint you, but you are far from the worst thing to happen to us.”

A short, sneering smile flitted across Hastur’s face as he said, “I’m hurt,” and wished he could torture them all into screaming, wordless insanity before he left, could show them he really was the worst, if they only knew, playing around with these sad little twisted souls.  But the spell needed three casters, and the casters needed to remain alive to hold the gateway open while he travelled through it, so his plans for a last minute murder had had to be scrapped.  A shame, that.

And so the casting commenced, with Bobby doing his best to read Castiel’s writing and pronounce the newest dead language no one had spoken in millennia and Sam and Dean singing backup. I mean, performing the appropriate responses to the call and response sections, and putting the appropriate ingredients into their places at the right time and setting them on fire or spilling the blood or spitting or whatever the spell required.  As the final syllable clanged into place, there was a rather dramatic darkening of the lights and flickering of the candles.  But that was it.  They all looked around, growing increasingly embarrassed, worried, or irritated as the gate failed to appear.

After a full two minutes of nothing, Hastur popped his knuckles.  “Well, that was an absolutely lovely waste of time.  I wouldn’t normally transform three times in the same day, but if I don’t kill you now I will honestly regret it for the rest of my existence.”  His form started to flicker like the image on a bad tv.


	12. Chapter The Eleventh: In Which We Do the Time Warp Again

As the Winchesters took defensive stances and Castiel moved to protect them, they heard a massive tearing sound, like a giant ripping a fifty-foot bed sheet.  A ragged hole opened in the air behind Hastur and he re-solidified.  “Huh,” he said, looking at it.  Everyone agreed.  “I guess I can’t kill you after all.”

While the spell had clearly done something, it was not clear that it had done what it was meant to.  Through the tear in the universe, Hastur could see, not another Earth, but blackness, deep as the darkness of the void but without the sparkling cracks spilling out the light of life.  It did not look how he imagined, and he didn’t trust it.  “Well, you’ve certainly done something with all of your efforts, but it isn’t right.  That’s not my Earth.  That’s not anyone’s Earth. That’s not even Hell. What have you opened up?”  Hastur said turning.

He saw Dean shrug and frown.  “Don’t know.  Don’t really care.  That’s your door. Take it or don’t, ‘s not our problem anymore.”

Hastur’s eyes narrowed.  “I’m not going through there. Who knows where I’ll end up.”

It was Castiel who decided things.  “You are strange and off-putting,” he said as he strode forwards.  “Go now.”  And with that, he pushed Hastur into the hole in the universe and the darkness on the other side.

Hastur’s eyes widened as he felt himself falling backwards, and he flung his arms out wide, fingers scrabbling against the edges of the rift, but it was no use, there was no purchase to be had.  And so he fell, the one spot of brightness quickly shrinking and diminishing, disappearing into the profoundly solid blackness.  The sensation of falling, plummeting didn’t lessen, even as the emptiness became complete, almost solid.  Hastur was thrown into memory, forced to recall fears he had long thought gone, buried beneath the layers of time and neglect.  These old fears began to creep in, slowly, beginning somewhere in his core and spreading their tendrils through him as he had spread his tentacles through the Winchester’s house, shutting out the outside and trapping him inside his own mind.

He was halfway through the flashback of his first fall (the only one that really mattered) when he realized the blackness was no longer so profound.  There was a distinct lightening around the edges, a graying and a reddening, like the emptiness was being lit by a massive fire. Somehow, that wasn’t comforting.

This landing was not much softer than that first, devastating one but it did lack the cold fresh shock of newness and the abrupt hollowing out.  Hastur groaned, indulging in a whole body flinch.  He had been so wrapped up in his memories that he had not even though to manifest his wings to slow his descent.  He levered himself off the ground and staggered upright, looking around dazedly.

Have you ever ridden in the subway and gotten out at (you assume, you were reading or eavesdropping, or watching the couple beside you voyeuristically out of the corner of your eye) your stop, and walked out to the street still distracted by whatever you were doing on the train?  Imagine that moment of disorientation, the abrupt appearance of sunlight, showing you a familiar street from an unfamiliar angle, and for a moment you think you are in the wrong place entirely, and you must take a full moment to adjust, even as the other people push past you, judging your confusion and dismissing you as just another annoyance, or else you will begin walking and you just know you will go the wrong way and end up, a block later, in a completely new and awfully incorrect place, totally lost one street from where you should be.  That is Hastur right now.

This place is (horribly, terribly, awfully) familiar.  It is a crossroads on the path to Hell, the path paved (yes, dear reader, you know where this is going don’t you) with good intentions.  He looked down to reassure himself.  Yes, on the uneven paving stones that made up his landing pad were words, scratched, etched, and burned in, a “humorous” touch put in by one of the higher ups, meant to ironically, and most unfunnily press home the point to the damned that it really was time to abandon all hope and all sense of humor.

But the stones gave no clue as to which direction he should take.  The inscriptions did not all face the same way, meant to foster exactly the same sort of disorientation that Hastur was trying to combat.  He needed to get his bearings, else he’d end up where he started in worse shape than he began.  This could have gone better, infinitely better, but he supposed, credit where credit was due, it could have gone worse.  This wasn’t his Earth, but it wasn’t quite Hell either, and just outside was still _outside_.  If he could get a grip on himself, all he would have standing in his way was a brisk walk and a bit of a push to get to the next plane.  He’d wing it straight to London and track Crowley from there.  He wouldn’t rush, but he wouldn’t rush in either.  It could still work.  He could still pull this off.  He could still fix this.

So he closed his eyes and concentrated, unleashing his more than worldly senses to find the concentrated, emanating evil that Hell’s core would give off.  Once he had that direction, all he had to do was walk the other way.

Yes.  There.

And if it felt a little different than it should, well, put it down to his recent trauma and never having tried to feel it from this place, this ladder between planes where perhaps things got a bit stretched or skewed.  He had made it back to his universe and everything would go as originally planned.

So Hastur walked, striding swiftly across the cobbles.  It was a bit of a trek, meant to drive any especially slippery souls into despair before they could reach the end and escape, but Hastur felt the wafting tendrils of Hellish energy slowly fading with each step and it energized him (that and the several “demon” souls he had recently consumed).  It felt like eternity, but it was just under two hours when Hastur reached the end.  He had chosen his direction correctly and he crowed a bit.  You know, inside.

He pushed at the doorway, the portal to Earth, and found it stuck fast.  That was unexpected.  He stood for a moment, puzzled.  While it was true he had been out of commission for a while, this was the main entrance, or it should have been.  It was how the field agents ushered the souls of their damned victims to their place of torment.  It shouldn’t stick like a damp attic door.  It was true that time in the Winchester’s universe could be different, could be significantly slower than time here… It was unfortunate that he had no way to know how long he had been gone.  Even so, what could happen in that time to stick fast the gates of Hell?  Unless… he laughed out loud at his foolishness, at his carelessness.  There were side entrances, servants’ doors if you will, for the field agents to trek their way out and get used to their new bodies on the way.  They had been paved the same as the main pathway, to both prevent the escape of souls and perhaps inspire any first time tempters unfamiliar with the multitude of ways one could damn a human soul.  Most had fallen into disuse as the number of field agents had dwindled.  This must be one of them.  He needn’t have worried so—if he had chosen the wrong direction he’d only have walked into a disused store room at best.  Things were still fine.

Hastur took a step back and stretched.  He’d just have to force it open again.  Throwing all of his weight against the door, and backing it up with a burst of infernal power, he felt it budge, just barely.  And so he tried again.  And again.  This is a bit boring, so let’s say he took 20 and skip ahead some.  Suffice it to say, it took a while and it was somewhat difficult, but it took nowhere near as long as clawing through the fabric of two universes and it was nowhere near that hard.  When the door finally gave, it went with a crash, and Hastur tumbled through into a cavern that looked little different from the other side.  He crawled and clawed his way to the top of the pit, into a building the sight of which made him pause.  The walls were scorched and blackened by fire, and charred books littered the unstable floor.  A heavy bookshelf lay on the ground, the useless shells of the books it had once held crushed beneath its still present weight.  As Hastur picked his way through the wreckage of the room, he tried to place this particular Hellmouth.  He tasted the air and spat.  Where ever he had come out, it tasted like Hell’s locker room.  Someone had obviously been abusing their field agent privileges.  No wonder they had sealed the portal.  Trust one idiot to ruin it for the rest.  Hastur snorted at that thought.  Not that that was a particularly uncommon thing, it seemed.  What was Hell coming to these days?

He made his way through the charred ruins of the building, picking his way over blackened support beams and trying to find the exit.  Whatever this place had been, it sure was awfully large.  A hospital maybe, or a school.  He found a door and pushed his way out, stepping gratefully into the clean night air, then circled around to the front of the building, hoping for a clue to help him orient himself so that he wouldn’t have to take off flying blind.  He could just make out “Sunnydale High” through the smudges that covered the name over the still standing front door.

Sunnydale?  That didn’t ring any bells.  He’d have to figure this out the hard way.  He chose a direction at random and began to walk, looking for the edge of the town or a highway or anything that could give him a clue.  If he met a snack along the way, so much the better.

He didn’t notice the very pale, very blonde man in the long leather trench coat watching him from behind one of the trees that still graced the lawn of the abandoned school building.  Spike usually patrolled the graveyard, looking for other vamps to stake to take the edge off his inability to kill, but Buffy had been getting snippy lately, ‘Though really,’ he thought, ‘when was she not?’ and so had, on a whim, taken a stroll to check out the Hellmouth.  He hadn’t expected anything interesting to happen, not when most of the baddies seemed drawn to crypts and such as opposed to the door to their true home, but it looked like life just handed him a little present.  Perhaps tonight wouldn’t be so boring after all.

He stalked after the well-dressed (must be a) demon that had just emerged from the school, looking quite the badass.  He moved silently, like a panther or some other large quite killer cat, and when he was right behind the demon, tapped him on the shoulder.  As Hastur turned around, Spike said, “You made a mistake coming here, mate,” and punched him in the face.


	13. Chapter The Twelfth: In Which It's Funny How This Also Takes Place During Season Five

Hastur stumbled backwards, pin-wheeling his arms to regain his balance.  As he staggered to a stop, he took in the appearance of his assailant.  Then he paused, shook his head, and took in the appearance of his assailant’s essence.  Great, a vampire. His favorite kind of bottom-feeding Hell scum.  He felt his face and popped his broken nose back into place, healing it with a thought.  Right.  First “demons” made of witches souls and now vampires.  While he liked the occasional spot of ultra-violence, this was edging toward the bad side of tiresome.  Still, this bottle-blonde circling him should be easy enough to take out.  He let go of his form and lashed out with one of his monstrous tentacles.  At least, that’s what he meant to do.  When a moment had passed with not so much as a flicker of change, Hastur began to get worried.

It was then that Spike (never the greatest strategist) made his move.  He was used to pauses during battles, but usually those were filled with declarations of power, demand to be taken to the Slayer, of the Mayor, or the museum, or out to coffee or whatever stupid reason the demon of the week had left Hell for.  It wasn’t usually just silence, tense and waiting.  But if Mr. Fancy Suit wasn’t going to fight back, this was going to be a disappointing night.  So he rushed him from behind.

Now, darling reader, my one and only, you might be thinking this isn’t going to end well for Hastur, trapped in his meat suit, with no extra-dimensional powers to call on.  But let none of us forget—demons were once angels, and angels are soldiers of God.  Now some (angels and demons alike) aren’t on active duty and rather let themselves go.  Certainly, demons whose pet deadly was sloth weren’t going to be worth much on the final battlefield.  But Hastur had always favored a vile mix of wrath and lust, and on the days when he wasn’t buried under paperwork, (or those days when he said “screw it, it’s not like it’s going anywhere and no one reads it anyways”—not true, as it turns out, but that’s not the point of this tangent right now) he would spend his time training with his guards, which generally resulted in him having to find  replacements for his now dead guards.  His recent, crippling obsession had ruined him as a paper-pusher but had really dialed up the wrath and he was now painfully proficient at “darts,” by which I mean “any and all projectiles, even things you wouldn’t normally throw.”  His time in the torture pits hadn’t dulled these skills terribly much.

Of course, Spike doesn’t know any of this.  So let us take a moment to appreciate his confidence right now, how good it must feel to think he’s going to land this blow, work out some of his aggression on this demon. 

Have you appreciated it enough?  Then let’s move on.

Spike swung his fist at the back of Hastur’s head with a very sharp grin on his face.  He was surprised when, instead of the sweet connection of knuckles and skull, he felt his hand grabbed and twisted, as Hastur spun around and blocked the blow.  Keeping hold of the vampire’s hand, he struck hard with his free hand, hitting the elbow and breaking it.  Spike let out a howl of pain that turned into a snarl as he vamped up.  Swinging his non-broken elbow at Hastur’s face, he freed himself and backed up, circling and looking for his chance.

Hastur didn’t give him one.

Pressing his advantage against a wounded foe, he picked up a piece of metal from the ground, part of the broken building behind him that had been flung further afield than its fellows, and wielded it like a sword.  He lashed out once, twice, forcing Spike into a defensive position from which he clumsily blocked the strikes, until he was backed into a tree. The moment’s confusion this caused gave Hastur the opening he had been looking for, and he thrust the makeshift sword into Spike’s chest, pinning him to the tree.  If it had been made of wood, Spike would have been dusted.  As it was, it merely left him aching and cranky and pinned to a tree.  Hastur thought about devouring him in this form, but he wouldn’t be able to absorb his essence, and it would cause rather a large mess, and would probably ruin his suit.  He leaned forward and tasted the air around Spike, ignoring his spluttered, “Oi, mate, bloody personal space!” and decided he really wasn’t missing much.  And so he stepped back and addressed his captive audience, having realized that at least some good could come from this pest.

“Where am I?  You sound English, but I know of no ‘Sunnydale’ in England, not one with a doorway to Hell.”

Spike paused momentarily in his attempts to unpin himself and stared at him.  “You mean you ended up in this godforsaken city on _accident_?  You poor bastard.  This is the Slayer’s city!  She’ll have fun with you.” He waited, expecting recognition followed by fear, anger, or triumph to flash across the demon’s face, but all he got was confusion.  That was rare.

“Who is this ‘slayer’?”

“She’s only the chosen one, a virtuous—“ stifle a laugh, that’s a good chap “—young woman charged with hunting down vamps and demons and what-have-you to make the world a better, safer place, balance the dark with light, yadda yadda and so it goes on  How can it be that you’ve never heard of her?  They’ve got slayers all around the globe, the Watcher’s Council set that up pretty well.”

Hastur sighed, feeling his fleeting hope—no wait, demons don’t hope— _anticipation_ at arriving in his world evaporate.  Another wrong turn, another false start.  No wonder he couldn’t shed this mortal form—well some wonder, what were his restrictions on this version of Earth, what were his powers—it did go quite far in the clearing up mysteries department.  But it might still help if he knew _where_ on this wrong Earth he was.  “I notice you still haven’t answered my original inquiry,” Hastur said, as he gripped the ragged piece of metal and twisted, wringing a choking groan from the pinned vampire.  “I suppose I shall be forced to ask again.  Where am I?”

“That bloody hurts, you know,” Spike began, but as he watched Hastur’s slow, unamused eyebrow raise and the tightening of his grip on the metal shaft he continued quickly with “All right, all right.  No need to get your knickers in a twist.  Sunnydale, California. In the United States, continent of North America, Earth, Solar System.  What more do you need?”

Hastur made a discontented face and turned to leave.  As an afterthought, he glanced back and said, “I don’t suppose you happen to know _which_ Earth…” but the blank look he got in return assured him there was no more worthwhile information to be gleaned from this source.  And so he left the vampire pinned to the tree.  The sun would take care of it (he assumed) or it would get away.  He didn’t particularly care.  He needed information and a magic user—terrible thought, brief and hard, what if they had no magic in this world?  Nearly, but not quite, impossible to leave it then, oh he ho—, pra—, wanted desperately that that was not the case, but he had been hoping (yes, let’s just admit it) too much recently and it was hard to keep going when those hopes kept dashing themselves on the unforgiving rocks of reality (which were seeming especially unforgiving lately).

Spike was less than happy that he was apparently being abandoned to his fate by the least chatty demon he had ever met.  “Oi, you’re not just gonna leave a bloke attached to a bloody tree, are ya?”  he called after the retreating figure, but apparently that’s exactly what Mr. Talkative planned to do, as he didn’t even pause at the noise.  Spike gave up on him and renewed his struggles with the iron bar.  It was lodged quite deeply in the tree behind him.  He was momentarily impressed by the strength it took to do that before realizing he was giving credit to a nameless demon that had just bested him in the shortest fight he’d ever had where he didn’t emerge as the victor.  He didn’t envy him once he met Buffy, though.  She’d kick that sorry, confused head right off his body.

He was beginning to fear that the only way off this tree was forward.  He couldn’t get a good enough grip on the metal that was now slick with his blood.  “Bloody Hell,” he groaned, before gritting his teeth and pushing himself along the rod, away from the tree.  He let out a loud groan at the extraordinarily painful effort, before groaning again in disappointment as he realized he had only moved forward about halfway along the pole.  He braced for his next effort and with a shout slid bleeding and clutching the hole in his chest to the ground.  After a few moments spent lying in self pity, he levered himself up, shook himself, and thought, ‘I’d better go tell Buffy.’

Hastur, meanwhile, was walking along what seemed to be the city’s main street, when he saw, down a lane that declared itself to be Maple Court, a place he might find some answers.  The Magic Box looked promising and the faint power he could feel humming inside told him his fear of being trapped in a magicless universe had been for naught.  He walked up to the front door—it was closed, of course, but that was perhaps for the best—and tried his hand at a little ‘magic’ of his own.

Nothing.

The door remained locked.  He scowled and skulked his way around to the back. It wouldn’t do to attract too much attention until he had a plan and a better handle on his exact limitations and weaknesses, so he broke in quietly through the back door.  He took one look around the front room of the shop and knew that junk would be no help until he had a plan.  Snooping around the main floor revealed a training room, stocked with very interesting weapons. He had a minor, externally-induced panic attack at seeing the crosses on the wall, which was less than encouraging.  He was not looking forward to seeing what holy water would do to him here.

His foray into the shop’s loft proved much more fruitful, and he looked upon the old, leather-bound tomes with a bibliophilic delight that would have done Aziraphale proud.  One of these would have something useful in it.  It must.

Now, Hastur, as we have discussed previously in this chapter, is a fighter, not a scholar.  He can push through mountains of Hellish paperwork, but the lower demons who file it are never very impressed.  He’s not used to research, which was part of the reason he didn’t immediately kill the Winchesters.  But now there is no one to do it for him, so he perseveres.  It takes a _long_ time.  The sky will grow light before he finds any clues to what he needs to locate himself and his Earth in the multiverse.

But before it does that, in the solid dark of the night, Spike, quietly bleeding and loudly cursing his life (well, death), demons in general, this demon in particular, and every tombstone that gets in his way, stumbles through the graveyard (Restfield Cemetery?  Really, is that what it’s called?  Why, though?) looking for Buffy and most emphatically _not_ looking for another fight in his state.  Accelerated healing was great and all, but an almost stake to the heart took a lot out of a vamp.

He heard the sounds of fighting and ducked behind a mausoleum.  When he heard a cry and that disorienting sound of a vamp dusting, he came out, as suavely as he could.  And was then forced to dodge a near staking.  “Hey!”

“Sorry,” Buffy said, though she didn’t sound or look it. “What do you want now?”

Spike huffed.  “I was going to give you some important information about a demon that’s just popped out of the Hellmouth in the old school, but now I don’t know.  Probably wasn’t important anyway.  Can’t really stop to chat—got a date with the telly, my stories are on.”  He turned to leave.  If she was going to be a bitch, that demon could just kill her. It would serve her right.

Buffy grabbed his arm.  “What demon?”


	14. Chapter The Thirteenth: In Which He Would Have Gotten Away With It, Too, If It Wasn't For Those Meddling Kids

Spike told Buffy about what he had seen, generously padding the fight sequence with hits of his own that had never happened.  She didn’t believe he’d been pinned to a tree, so he showed her the hole in his trench (how he was going to fix that, he’d no idea).  Her subsequent laughter was, he felt, really uncalled for.  Still, it got her attention and got her tracking down the Scoobies so they could meet up at Giles’ house for a planning session.  A rather short one, as it turned out, because they needed more info before they could figure out anything—Spike’s description of the “demon” was supremely unhelpful, given that he said it “looked just like a human,” which ruled out almost all of the demons that were easy to track and fight and gave no clues as to which of the ones left it was.  It could be, quite literally, anything.  A quick patrol showed no signs of a demon and no indication of where he had gone.  This was unusual, because most of the demons that visited Sunndale were rather obvious about their presence.  They would have assumed it was a hoax, but they couldn’t imagine Spike admitting to being beaten unless it had actually happened, and he really loved that coat (he got it off a slayer, after all, and why would he ruin one of his kill trophies just to mess with some teenagers?).  So they put off ‘til morning the hunting and the research, hoping that maybe they could get some homework done, or actually get a decent amount of sleep.

When Giles went to open The Magic Box the next morning, he was greeted with a rather unpleasant surprise.  Hastur had been up, attempting to research, all night (of course, evil doesn’t sleep, we’ve had this conversation before).  He hadn’t found anything substantial on how to transport beings between dimensions, but he’d found a couple of references, so it seemed like it was at least possible in this realm.  Less important in the grand scheme of things, but personally exciting, he’d found out why some of his miracles weren’t happening—this universe ran on a different mathematical base than his (and apparently the Winchesters), so he had to do his manipulations of the fabric of reality completely differently than he was used to.  He wasn’t great at translating maths (having always had more of an intuitive approach to it that worked quite well in his world), so he’s only gotten some books to hover for him while he read, but that was better than nothing and it made him feel less restricted.  It would be useless in a fight, but if he was stuck here for longer than he planned, he’d have at least something in his back pocket.

That was how Giles found him—sitting in the loft, surrounded by piles of priceless books (some being treated quite disrespectfully, for shame sir) with two hovering right at eye level so he could compare their textual clues without having to resort to using his arms or, Someone forbid, a table.  Giles saw Hastur before Hastur saw him, or even heard him enter, because he was so engrossed in his search.  There wasn’t anything especially demonic about the man sitting in the loft, but individuals who felt they had to break into the magic shop tended to be bad news, and the newest bad news was a demon, and Giles, unlike Hastur, was pretty good at maths and made the connection almost instantly.  What he should do about it was a different matter altogether—if he left, the being might leave and they’d be back were they started, or worse, because it would have information and they would still have none.  But if it could defeat Spike, with his vampire strength and fighting experience of which he loved to brag, it could probably kill Giles with very little effort, and he rather liked being alive.  He decided to compromise, and call backup before potentially getting himself killed.  He walked quietly to the back room, where he thought he could make a call without being heard—he reached Xander first, (because this is still 2000 in their world and I don’t think Buffy has a cell phone at this point, though Xander definitely does because he called Anya on it when he got that apartment in the episode where he got split in two) and asked him to gather the group because he’d found the demon, it was in The Magic Box, and please hurry and make sure to bring Buffy because he was about to do something stupid.  He hung up and turned around and nearly had a heart attack. “Oh!” The demon was standing right behind him. “Pardon me, sir.  I… I didn’t hear you come in.  We’re not actually open yet, so if you wouldn’t mind stepping outside for a moment while I…” he trailed off, at the unchanging, mildly amused look on the demon’s face. Spike was right.  He was weirdly quiet compared to the demons they normally faced.

The demon held out a book, open to a page with a rather unpleasant illustration.  The title opposite the image read “Old Ones: Hastur” and in smaller print “The Unspeakable One, Him Who Is Not To Be Named, Lord of Interstellar Spaces, The King in Yellow.”  Giles took the book as the demon said, “That,” he pointed a rather clawed finger at the open page, speaking quietly but forcefully, “is me. I do not want to be in your world.  Help me leave it, and I will not drive you mad.”

“Oh, dear,” Giles said.  He skimmed the text, glancing at Hastur quickly and with growing worry after every paragraph.  “Oh, dear.”  Yes, that was the Yellow Sign in the book, and on the demon’s tie pin.  The Old Ones were too widely feared and worshipped for a lower ranking demon to even chance being caught pretending to be one, and it wasn’t something that most would even believe, so there was no _reason_ for it to be lying.  And Spike had mentioned that it was asking about locations, had said something about “which Earth” he was on.  Oh, and yes, there it was, “It is said to be Cthulhu’s (half)brother, and is known for driving men mad with a single touch.”  Oh dear.

It was just then that the Buffy and the gang burst through the door of The Magic Box, decked out with a nice range of weapons to try on the undefined evil.  Their advance was more of an undignified group rush, with Xander yelling out “back, demon scum!” as he brandished a cross and vial of holy water, Willow playing backup with a stake (stakes can kill a lot of things, vampires being just the tip of that rather wooden iceburg), and Buffy brandishing a rather nice axe.  Anya had come along to see if she knew the demon (she didn’t).  Spike couldn’t come because it was sunny out.  I don’t think he’s especially disappointed about that, given his recent encounter.  He’s watching _Passions_ or something.  He watches that, it’s canon.

Hastur just looked at them and sighed, eyebrows furrowing as he pinched the bridge of his nose.  He’s really good at foiling the expectations of the Buffyverse isn’t he?  What a boring demon he makes when he’s not obsessed and focused on destruction.

Giles intervened.  “Buffy, this is… this individual is Hastur.  He’s, um… well he’s claiming to be an Old One.  But he hasn’t done anything harmful, yet, besides breaking into the shop, which he did a lot more gently than the last few did.  He says he just wants to go home.”

Willow lowered her stake.  “You mean like when we sent evil, vampy me back to that weird alternate universe she came from?”

“Quite like that, yes.”

“You have experience at transporting beings through holes in the fabric of the universe?” Hastur asked, mildly more impressed with the gaggle of teenagers before him.

“Well, yeah, but only when we accidentally brought them here in the first place,” Xander added.  Hastur’s expectations lowered themselves accordingly.

“Just one question,” Giles said, turning towards Hastur, “just so we know how many demons we’re dealing with, did you happen to fight a vampire wearing a black trenchcoat last night?”

“I’m surprised it lived,” Hastur replied.  “I thought it would perish when the sun rose.  Is that not what happens to vampires in your world?”

“Yeah, but we usually just stake them dead.  It’s faster.  Less… icky,” the one introduced as Buffy replied.  “You know, just dust ‘em and be done with it.”

Hastur smiled.  It wasn’t a nice smile.  “Now where is the fun in that?”

He was instantly disliked by everyone present, except Anya, who chose that moment to introduce herself.  Sticking out her hand, she said, “Hello!  I’m Anya.  I used to be Anyanka. I was a vengeance demon.  I cursed men who were unfaithful, harnessing the power of the wish, and was feared and revered throughout Eastern and Northern Europe!”

Hastur’s smile changed into something much more disturbing (for everyone who wasn’t Anya, at any rate) and he took her proffered hand and raised it to his lips, brushing a light kiss along her knuckles as he bowed, replying “Hastur, the King in Yellow.  It is a pleasure to meet a demon as beautiful as you.  I have always had the greatest respect for vengeance demons, such creative individuals, really showing the rest of us the way.”

Buffy and Willow made fake gagging noises and Xander protested the encroachment on his boyfriend territory.  Anya was terribly flattered, until Xander took the book Giles was still holding and showed her the illustration.  “He looks like that.  He’s made of tentacles.”

Anya looked thoughtful for a moment, which sent everyone to a terrible visual place because the only thing Anya ever seemed to be thoughtful about was sex, but then shook her head.  “No, that wouldn’t work.”  And no one asked what she meant because no one ever wanted to think about that again.  I hope you enjoyed that horrible visual place, darling reader, I really do.

“Let’s… let’s move this conversation to the front room where we can all get to work on trying to send Mr. Hastur away from here.  I mean, back to his world,” Giles said into the building awkward silence.

So the Scoobies settled into another round of “find the spell in the spell stack” while Anya and Hastur wandered off to talk about demon things (everyone assumed, because that was the only thing they could stomach assuming those two would talk about).  Buffy took this opportunity to take Giles into the back room and have a talk with him.

“Okay, so he’s an Old One and his powers are remarkably like Glory's and that’s awful.  How do we know he hasn’t teamed up with Glory and whatever her deal is?  How do we know he’s not her brother or something?”  She said after they’d closed the door.

“Well,” said Giles, taking off his glasses.  “I suppose we don’t, but frankly, I’d like to take this one at face value.  He hasn’t fought anyone but Spike—and who here hasn’t fought with Spike?  And he hasn’t manifested in his true form and started devouring the world, so I say what harm could there be?”


	15. Chapter The Fourteenth: In Which That Last Chapter Title Was Kinda Misleading, Huh?

It was, of course, then, in the middle of their investigation into the various spells that could sling a being from one plane to the next and leave them whole on landing, that Glory decided to drop by for a visit.

It was with her usual lack of subtlety that she waltzed into the shop, flanked by two of her black-eyed minions.  “Oh, look!  You’re all here together!  How convenient—maybe one of you can tell me: where is the key?”  Her gaze swept over the startled humans until it landed on Hastur, where she paused.  “You’re new.  Do you know where the key is?”  She smiled and strolled towards the other demon, instantly recognizing that he was other than human. Creature Identification is one of her skills, you know.  “Come on, you can tell me.  It can be our little secret. I won’t even kill you afterwards.”  Her smile grew wider, and she thought more encouraging.

But Hastur just shook his head and, with a bored look, said, “I’m afraid I am not familiar with the key you seek.  I’m new to this universe, so I’m rather out of the loop.”

Glory frowned and pouted.  “Well that’s no fun.  Still, maybe you can still be useful,” and with that she stuck her fingers into his brain.

What she intended to do with this individual whom she read nearly correctly as just another demon was suck out his sanity to buoy up her own, which was in a rather unfortunate state of flux.  She would just take a little brain suck and then interrogate the Slayer and her friends, and kill whichever ones were useless, and make them useful.  It was almost like recycling, so that was good, right?  Not that that sort of thing is a concern of Hell Gods, but there’s no reason not to take the credit when it’s given to you.  She anticipated a nice snack and then a nice talk, and maybe a nice, short fight.  Her black-eyed minions kept watch over the others, who were slowly and warily trying to create some kind of defensive plan without actually talking to each other.  There were a lot of meaningful glances at various parts of the shop and short head shakes.  Buffy briefly looked at Giles and gave a shrug indicating that apparently she was totally wrong for suspecting Hastur was working with Glory in any capacity and wasn’t that a shame.  Still, it would be kind of sad if Glory killed the least destructive demon they’d come across in a long time and left them with its empty, drooling shell.  Of course, that assumed that they would still be alive and in possession of their own sanity at that point, which was definitely not a given in this proof.

Hastur was in a state of surprise and mild worry.  There were fingers in his head, in his mind.  And the little team of teenagers that had been so keen to attack him this morning were hanging warily back, because he was a demon or because the thing trying to eat his mind was too powerful he wasn’t sure.  Probably a little of both, given the sort of juice this woman-shaped fiend had to pump out to achieve her little trick.  Or maybe he was just that weak on this realm.  Still, this was his home court—the mind was _his_ playground and if she was interested in a little friendly competition… He let a little of his mental guard down.

Glory felt the demon’s mind let her in.  He had an impressive mental wall, to resist her for as long as he had, but she always won in the end.  It was almost a shame to do this to someone with such promise, but that promise would translate well into a good meal and a good chunk of time where she could really focus.  But behind the wall, she didn’t feel the reservoir of sanity she was hoping to find.  This mind… she had known it wasn’t a human mind, which would ordinarily not present a problem—she’d snacked on her minions before, when it was absolutely necessary, they still possessed rationality, just a different kind.  But this mind… At first it was like everything was written backwards, the words familiar but not sensible on the first glance.  Digging deeper, she saw the wrong base code and the wrong world, but that wasn’t what made her gasp and open her eyes.  No, it was everything else that she found, the shocking pile of carefully constructed crazy that was guiding this creature, the little fraying, threadbare carpets of sanity that adorned this house of wacko making up less than a snack.  Though, Glory being Glory, she did try to take a bite.

Hastur opened his eyes and grinned.  “Darling, the mind is _my_ domain,” he said, as he slammed his hand open-palmed into the middle of her forehead, jabbing his tie pin bearing the Yellow Sign into her mind.  It was like a completing a circuit, and suddenly both minds were open to both beings.  Hastur could see her essence warring with the mind of the host, could see the cracks in her sanity, patched with the multitude of stolen minds.  It was like trying to use scotch tape to seal the cracks of a boat.  It worked for a moment, but only a moment, and then the waters would seep through again and the useless piece of tape would float away.  It was almost insulting, how she used these humans' (and, was that, yes, demons') minds so carelessly, so ineffectually, so… uselessly.  She could have done so much more.

With the connection open between them, they stood locked, each with one hand upon (or in) the other’s head, and Hastur watched as a little bit of his fraying sanity slipped out of his mind and into hers, to stitch up one of the smaller cracks.  In retaliation, he struck out with his scattered thoughts, flinging random insanity at the shell that was her vessel’s mind, broadening the cracks that were already there and creating a couple of new ones, spider-webbing out from the point of contact like the glass of a windshield that has just connected intimately with a rock.  He felt her flinch, physically, and try to pull away, but if she was going to start this, with _him_ , she wasn’t going to get off that easily.  He pushed forward, physically forcing the pin further into her skull and mentally encroaching on her mindspace with the whole of his own.  He began to pour thoughts into her.  If she wanted to feast on his mind, let her feast. Let her choke on her folly.

While Glory and Hastur were engaged in this battle of the minds, Buffy and Co, realizing that, at least for the moment, Glory was busy and not paying attention to them, made their move on the minions.

Buffy took one of the minions herself.  It ducked the right hook she sent at its face, but couldn’t dodge the sweeping kick that knocked it off its feet.  Taking her chance, she straddled the prone demon and delivered a flurry of head blows, before rolling off to avoid a swipe at her face.  She grabbed an axe from the shop’s wall and spun around, a clean shot taking off its head.  As the body crumpled to the ground and the head rolled under the shop’s counter, she remembered why she preferred fighting vampires—cleanup was so much easier when your bad guy just went poof.

Xander and Willow flanked the other minion while Giles and Anya tried to find something to break the apparent stalemate between the two demons (or, all right, the Old One and the Hell God, Giles’ brain treacherously reminded him).  Xander backed the black-eyed demon into a corner with the cross and holy water he’d kept near him while they researched, appropriately not trusting Hastur as far as he could throw him (which was ‘not very,’ especially when compared to how far Buffy could throw people).  Willow grabbed the stake she’d brought, dithered for a moment, then plunged forward, forcing the wooden spike into the demon’s chest with both hands.  As it slumped down the wall, gurgling, she backed away with her hands up, doing a little grossness shimmy, and going “eeeww.”  Xander clapped her on the back and said, “You did good, Will.”

While this fighting was going on, Anya was arguing with Giles about how to break the stalemate.  “I want Hastur to be alive and not crazy. He appreciates my work and I enjoy hearing people say nice things about me.”

Giles was not especially sympathetic.  He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.  “While Hastur certainly has been more polite, he’s just as dangerous as Glory.  Allowing them to short each other out may be our best chance to get rid of her, or at least put her down for a long time.”

“But if Glory wins, she’ll have absorbed the mind of an Old One. She might be fixed forever, and then we’ll all have our brains eaten because we have no other way to get to her except through her crazy.”

Giles sighed.  “You’re right about that, of course.  All right, why don’t we—”

Anya never found out what Giles was going to suggest, because at the moment of Xander’s congratulatory back pat and Buffy’s mournful thoughts on the terribleness of cleaning up demon corpses, the two enormously powerful supernatural entities pulled away from each other with a gasp. Glory clawed at her forehead as she stumbled backward, wrenching out the tie pin as she fell to the floor.  “Look what you’ve done to my face!” she shrieked, trying to push herself up.  After she regained her feet, she looked around, clutching at her head.  The dead minions decided it for her—this had taken too much out of her, injured her crumbling defenses against insanity and weakening her control of her vessel.  She beat a strategic retreat, calling threats behind her.  As the shop door tinkled closed, they turned nearly as one to see how Hastur had fared.  What they saw did not make them want to celebrate.

Hastur was sitting, having collapsed to the floor after he pulled away.  With one hand on his head, he reached for the discarded tie pin and just held it, examining it for a moment, before reattaching it to his tie without cleaning off the Hell God’s blood.  He started to laugh as his form began to flicker, once, twice, before resolidifying.  “I think she’s made me better at math,” he chuckled.

Anya approached him warily.  “Are you all right?  Do you feel crazy?” she asked, concerned she would lose one of the small pool of people who complimented her.

“I don’t feel especially well, but at the same time I feel remarkably more in tune with this world.  I think I might even be able to manifest now,” he smiled, and it was a little hazy and entirely not reassuring.

“What did you do to her, to make her run like that?  What happened?” Giles asked.

Hastur laughed again—it was unnerving.  “I just let her in.  I was very nice.  I shared nearly everything with her.  Very,” another chuckle “intimate.  She’s shockingly weak in the mind department.  She’s struggling so hard against her insanity, building walls, wasting minds to patch them as they crack.  Weak.  You have to embrace insanity, not fight it.  Harness it and it can be your greatest power source, an unshakable foundation.  That’s what I’ve done.”  He met Giles’ eyes for the first time during this exchange and smiled.  “You’re lucky she hasn’t figured that out yet.  If she had, she might be almost as strong as me."


	16. Chapter The Fiftheenth: In Which So It Goes, Heaven Knows, Life Has Dealt Him Some Terrible Blows

Hastur was feeling quite unwell.  It was a bit what he would have imagined a bad trip to feel like if he’d ever heard the phrase and knew more than a passing thought’s worth about human drugs.  He’d been bluffing somewhat when he’d spoken to Giles—Glory was infinitely stronger than him in this universe, and it was by pure, blessed fortune that he’d been able to fight her in the one arena that would always be his to rule.  Still, he’d won at a substantial cost.  While it was true that he’d harnessed his own insanity, compressing it like coal and turning it into a glittering and focused diamond of drive and creativity, the little pieces of sanity that surrounded it were important.  You didn’t have to fight crazy, but you did need to balance it with some rationality.  That was what composed the whole of the difference between an evil genius and a drooling lunatic, what made their choices so different, though they seemed to stem from the same set of desires.

His head ached.  And he worried about that.  He was used to impulsive desires, the urge to maim and kill indiscriminately, to take anything negative within himself and spread it around outside, to make the world without darker than the world within.  But he hadn’t remained a Duke of Hell by acting on these desires willy-nilly.  He needed control.  His obsession and that horribly misconceived Operation Salvation had been proof of that, a momentary lapse in his otherwise pristine (if evil) record.  At this rate, he would kill these teenagers and then he’d be stuck here, in a world with terrible composition and entities that could rip his corporeal form to shreds and leave his essence trapped and powerless in this awful universe forever.  And so he sat with his head in his hands, breathing deeply (he’d heard somewhere that that helped humans, and he was willing to try a lot right now), and trying to shroud his crazy diamonds in the rags of sanity that Glory had left him.

Giles was working furiously, trying to find a spell that would work to get him out of their dimension, regardless of where it sent him (well, that’s not quite true, Giles is one of the good guys and Hastur had made a pretty good show of fighting Glory, which should have been their job, and he’d taken a pretty bad hit and hadn’t tried to kill any of them yet, which was more than you could say about Spike and they still spoke with him sometimes).  When Hastur had looked him in the eye, he’d let a little of his mask slip, shown Giles what precisely was lurking underneath the underneath, and it had been terrifying.  Hastur would burn this world down if he could, and he would dance in the flames.  He was weakened right now, but in all the wrong ways, and if he recovered substantially in everything except sanity, they would all be doomed.  Hastur and Glory would fight over the earth, destroying it as they carried on like super-powered two-year-olds, the key would be lost, and so would everything else.  No, he’d ship Hastur out of this universe and someone else could deal with him.  The brief pang of guilt he felt at dropping this problem on an unsuspecting, innocent world was quite small in comparison to his fear for the safety of their world, so he was moving forward, and doing so quickly.  If he could find Hastur’s world and ship him there, so much the better.  If not, they would all cope.

Everyone else was doing their best to help Giles, Willow doing most of the rest of the heavy lifting in the research department, as she had at least one additional experience with alternate universes than everyone else, but it was slow going. They gave Hastur a wide berth as they crossed the floor of the shop and spoke in hushed voices, each hoping that the next moment that they would hear Giles or Willow say “I’ve got it” or “Eureka” or something positive, something besides sighs of disappointment and the endless turning of pages.

Finally, they had a possibility.  Willow had been looking into variations of the spell that sent her evil vampire doppelganger home, when she found a promising, powerful returning spell.  “Ooh! Ooh, hey, look at this.”  Everyone rushed over to look, though only Giles really knew what he was seeing.  “See, this could work, right?  It’s a really powerful returning spell, that even mentions other worlds, see right here, and we have all the ingredients in the shop!”  A pause, a look of worry. “Oh.  Except this one—we need the blood of the intended traveler.”

“Ew, gross.  Why?  When does magic ever need blood?” Xander asked.

“The spell needs something to latch onto, to make sure its sending the right thing to the right place.  It’s really powerful, and it would probably work…” Willow trailed off, glancing over at Hastur, “if he would give us some of his blood.”

“Is that really something you want to ask him now?” Xander asked.  “I’d be worried he’d go all flickery and creepy on us again.”

“I’ll ask him, then,” said Buffy.  “What’s he going to do to me?”

“Wham you with his crazy mojo?” Xander suggested.

Buffy shrugged.  “I’m pretty good at resisting thrall.  I bet crazy mojo’s similar.”  With that, Buffy walked over to where Hastur still sat, her heels making a pleasant staccato beat on the floor. She stopped before him and crossed her arms.  “Hastur, right?  We need your blood.”  Hastur looked up without raising his head.  “Why the gloomy face?  We’re gonna send you home.  Back to your…” she paused, trying to be cheery and positive, “kingdom in Hell or your cozy little cave of evil where you can terrorize your own minions again.  Be excited!”

“It won’t work,” Hastur intoned dully.

“Why not?  Be positive and the world will be your oyster, or something.  Now give me your hand.”

“It won’t work using my blood as an anchor.  That’s how I ended up here.”

There was a very quiet pause from the table of researchers.  “What do you mean, ‘that’s how you ended up here’—you didn’t come straight from your world?”

“No.  I came from a different world, and we tried a spell using my blood as an anchor and I ended up on the walkway between your Hell and your Earth.  I need to get to my Earth.”  He put his head in his hands.  “I don’t feel well,” he groaned and his form flickered briefly.  Buffy made and “ergh” face and shrugged helplessly at Giles, who was becoming progressively more worried about the Old One as time went on and he continued to sit there being ill.

Hastur was not in a happy place (not that he usually was, but…you know what?  You’re right, that’s a terrible description. Let me start again).  Hastur had once been an angel, known the glory of God, basked in his essence and been generally fulfilled for quite a while (there wasn’t time back then, so I can’t tell you how long until the discontent began to eat its way into his then-angelic heart).  Then he Fell, his Grace ripped away, his essence burning as it changed and he was flung into the Pit, a place the definition of torment.  That was the worst experience of his existence.

He eventually lost most of his mind (most demons did, though their insanity manifested itself in different ways.  Dagon, for example, was really anal about filing.  I know, crazy right?), and became well-known for the creativity of his violence and how… interestingly he occasionally mixed that with lust.  He earned fear and respect from his colleagues, which is the best you can hope for in Hell.  He gained a partner, another Duke, whom he _loathed_.  But consistency breeds a kind of contentment, even if it is served with a side of simmering rage.  Hastur saw his partner murdered—wiped out of existence—by his least favorite demon in the most brutal way demon-on-demon violence could play out.  That was the second worst experience of his existence.

Hell’s Antichristmas Party of 1267 was the third, but we’re not going to get into that, for all our sakes.

In an obsessive, rage-fueled vengeance-quest, he utterly destroyed the last remnants of the fear and respect he once commanded and was arrested under false charges and subjected to millennia of torture.  That was the fourth worst experience of his existence.

If he had to rate how he felt right now, after botching his escape and being shunted to the wrong universe by the most sinful, self-righteous humans and the least angelic angel he had ever had the misfortune of meeting, looking at a group of teenagers about to try to do that all over again after a Hell God stole some of the last remaining vestiges of his sanity (vestiges he had become rather fond of, which he was pretty sure he needed in order to not continue to make decisions that would get him arrested by the Hell Police, or worse, decommissioned and erased like Ligur).  He had a headache and he was tired.  He needed a break, but he didn’t want to—couldn’t—take one here.  This was slowly creeping its way (no, more like rapidly accelerating) up his worst experiences list.  It was currently at number nine, but he had the feeling it was only going to get higher (or lower, if you are a stickler about accurately describing countdowns).  That is what I meant when I said he wasn’t in a happy place.

This was, of course, when Buffy decided she had waited long enough.  Acting as anyone who had been a big sister for any amount of time would when the individual you were requesting something from refused to give it, she took it herself.  She grabbed one of Hastur’s wrists and pulled, forcing his arm out as Hastur was too startled to react in time to prevent it.  As she attempted to slice his wrist with the dagger she held, he attempted to fight back.  This was when Hastur realized something else—while Glory’s mental-fingering might have made him better at math, it hadn’t done anything good for his reaction time or his reactive fighting skills.  What ensued was possibly the silliest looking wrestling match a demon and a teenage girl holding a knife have ever engaged in.  Imagine it with me, will you?  Hastur, dressed to the nines in yellow and grey, very put out expression on his face, wrestling with a petite blonde in heels and probably those pink pleather pants with a nice top in a complementary pastel color.  It’s great right?  Absolute tops.  Nope, they’re not fighting, there’s no punching or anything.  Don’t add stuff I didn’t tell you to.  Just awkward wrestling.  Fantastic.

Eventually, after about five minutes of this (or less… I don’t know how long wrestling someone lasts before it is just too awkward to watch), Buffy was able to pin his arm on the ground and cut a nice bloody line in it.  The spell didn’t require much, so the amount on the blade was enough.  Hastur scrambled to his feet, glaring daggers at Buffy, the Scoobies, and the whole shop, furious but unwilling even now to destroy what was potentially his only out from this terrible, terrible universe.  As he healed his arm and straightened his cuff, while Xander said to Willow, “Yeah, we’re real lucky that Glory hasn’t gotten to be as powerful as him yet.”

 


	17. Chapter The Sixteenth: In Which We Try to Move Past the Dark Night of the Soul, Mostly 'Cause Hastur Hasn't Got One

This is getting rather ridiculous.  What happened to the evil murderer from Chapter Two that we know and love?  Where did he go, with his devouring people and tempting angels and driving his obsession (not, thank you very much, being driven _by_ it)?  Who is this sad sack that gets wrestled by a girl and teased by humans?  It is hard having expectations and then having the crushed, revived, and crushed again, yes, true.  But come on Hastur!  You’re a Duke of Hell in your world, and a terrifying Great Old One in the Winchesters _and here_!  So what if you’re going crazy now?  Do you really think you were that much better off before? Snap out of it!

Of course, Hastur can’t hear this, but that doesn’t mean something similar is not going through his head.  He’d been arrested for accidentally causing miracles while trying to commit demonicide, and that hadn’t fair.  If he was arrested now for failing in his demonic duties, he probably wouldn’t even fight it.  What was he doing?  He seethed.  Since when was he unwilling to do the dirty work of spells himself?  That was the whole problem here—he was relying on others.  Demons don’t trust, they don’t let others do for them what they could do themselves if they don’t want to wake up dead or demoted or eternally tormented because you cannot trust what you have not done yourself.  He felt better now, more focused, and he supposed he should thank that idiotic human teenager, though that would have to wait until after he disemboweled him and tore his soul to shreds.  If he could manifest and devour them all, all well and good. If he couldn’t he’d kill them anyways, mess be damned, blessed, and damned again.  No, actually, he still wouldn’t thank him.  He’s a demon, for fuck’s sake, he doesn’t say thank you.

Giles and Willow had begun to prepare the spell, were drawing sigils with chalk on the newly cleared table, and Buffy was assisting by scraping Hastur’s blood off the knife and into the bowl of other ingredients (I don’t know what’s in that bowl…chicken’s feet?  Salamander eyes?  Colored sand?  Could be anything.  But there’s definitely some of Hastur’s blood, you can feel sure of that).  Xander was loitering around, being the eternal back-up guy, and trying to keep an eye on Anya who was—oh.

She was right in front of Hastur, with a concerned pout and a roll of bandages to, he presumed, clean him up after his embarrassing roll-around with a teenage girl in pink pants.

“I’m getting very good at first aid,” she said, looking up at him with a smile.  “Let me see your arm and I’ll fix it for you.”  She held out her hand expectedly.

He momentarily imagined throwing her into a wall and storming over to the table to devour them right there, but he did have professional pride, and she had been a demon once (a pretty impressive demon if what she’d told him was true) and he didn’t kill his kind, unlike some.  The demons in the Winchester’s universe didn’t count—they weren’t real demons, only damned souls, and those were fair game.  And she was going to die eventually anyways, being mortal, and that must be punishment enough for someone used to the thought of eternity.  So instead of crushing her beneath his fist and snuffing out her terrible, now-mortal existence, he said, “You should probably leave, because I’m going to kill and devour everyone in this room.”

Instead of doing as he said, or cowering in terror, she glared.  “You can’t.  My boyfriend is in this room, and I won’t let you. I’m the only one who gets to devour him.”  She stood there with her arms crossed, directly in between him and the group of people he so wanted to kill.  He sighed, but he’d tried and that was more than most demons would do.  So he backhanded her across the face and as she stumbled he concentrated and tapped into his deep miracle reserve, pulling up from there the strength he’d lost in his battle with Glory, and punched her in the side with enough force to break ribs and send her flying into the counter, crashing through its glass top.

Buffy and Xander turned at this, Buffy with purpose and determination, Xander because he followed people and did what they did.  Giles and Willow continued to work the spell, which was further along than he’d thought, he realized as he looked and saw the air above the chalk lines writhing and twisting, distorting what should have been a clear view of the shelves behind it.  He dodged Buffy’s first swing, but felt as if he were moving through treacle, seeing the blows and knowing he could dodge them but having to force his body to listen and act fast enough to do as his mind knew it could.  He reached deeper into his reserves, tapping into the energy of the damned souls he’d consumed in the Winchester’s world.  He moved faster, dodging and managing a few defensive swipes, but he’d lost sight of Xander when he’d been doing energy upkeep and there he was, behind him with a vial of holy water and shit that burned, oh Someone save him, his eyes—

He screamed, clawing at his face and trying to curl inward and push outward at the same time to avoid any oncoming blows but keep his burning, sizzling skin away from the rest of himself.  He stumbled in the direction of the table, just as the portal opened and Buffy yelled now and Xander pushed and Hastur realized what was happening and thought ‘not again, no not again’ and he tried to manifest.  He managed a few tentacles as he tipped into the portal, and the wriggled out and around and tried to cling to the air, the table, the humans, anything, but Buffy grabbed an axe (made of silver from a cross blessed by a bishop) and that was much much worse and so with an unholy shriek he let go.

He didn’t fall this time, though he wouldn’t really have noticed if he had.  This journey was more… sideways.  Imagine the downward pull you feel in a rapidly rising elevator.  Now imagine that happening to the left and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what Hastur felt.  Now, it certainly didn’t _look_ like an elevator, but Hastur was still trying to get holy water out of his eyes and he didn’t get a very clear look.  If we’re doing comparisons, it looked absolutely nothing like the opening title sequence to _Doctor Who_.

Just as suddenly as the sideways pull had started, it stopped, and he stumbled, expecting to feel weightless and adrift, but instead feeling the steady pull of gravity and, once he’d fallen, the familiar feel of concrete.  He lay there for a moment, whimpering softly as the holy water evaporated and his skin and eyes began to heal.  Once his face felt simply hot as opposed to a plate of burning torment crawling toward his eye sockets, he tried sitting up.  It was harder to do than he’d hoped.  He groaned and, feeling around, found a wall to help himself stand.  He peered around with stinging eyes.  He seemed to be in an alleyway, and it seemed to be night time.  At least he didn’t have to claw through existence this time.  It smelled like London, but that didn’t mean anything.  He wouldn’t hope again.  He trudged to the mouth of the alley, and saw that it very likely was London.  He was even on a street that felt familiar, even though he had never bothered to learn their names, having no need for humanity’s navigational systems.  He closed his human eyes and looked deeper, felt the fabric.  Familiar, but not quite right.  He tried a small miracle, making sure to use one that he’d only ever done at home, and it didn’t work.  The math was different here too, but not too different.  He leaned against the wall and breathed, trying to find all the differences, all the problems, to confirm right away that this was wrong.  It took him an hour before he was satisfied, and he ended with a list of twenty five thousand similarities, and eighteen thousand differences, most of which were small but a few of which were fairly major, such as his inability to manifest here, not even with his improved mathematical skill.  He was sure there were more, but this was enough, this was proof.  He still wasn’t home.

He wasn’t as upset, this time, and he thought it must be because he hadn’t gotten his hopes up—hadn’t gotten excited.  He knew better now.

Much as he was loath to do it, he needed a rest.  Manifesting yourself against the will of an alternate universe took a lot out of an entity.  He felt his way back into the alley and slid down the wall.  Evil didn’t sleep (especially when that evil was a Duke of Hell and was in a dirty alleyway, but sometimes evil had to collapse a little from exhaustion.  He fell into a kind of recharge mode that could, to the untrained eye, be mistaken from sleep.

He “awoke” to the sound of chanting and the feeling that his skin was too tight and was trying to get tighter.

John Constantine had been at a pub, drinking and generally being surly and sarcastic, as was his wont.  He’d gotten into a pretty heated argument with one of the other patrons, and though it hadn’t devolved into a fight then, it had gotten serious enough for posturing and for the barkeep to say enough was enough, don’t break my tables of my glasses, and kick them both out.  So he’d gone wandering, lighting up a cigarette and mulling over his life in general and the unfairness of tonight in particular, and vaguely looking for another pub to pop into before last call.

Tonight being one of those particularly unfair life instances, he’d walked past an alley, and glanced in, and _seen_.  It was terrible, so terrible that even he, he who’d fought the devil in a battle of wits and won, who’d been through Papa Midnight’s poisoned dream world, he who had seduced a succubus (at least, that’s how he told it) couldn’t focus on it for more than a moment before it flickered back to a human shape.  That had never happened before.  His ability to see them had always been shockingly, terribly, _unfairly_ clear.

So he’d gone to investigate.  And by investigate, of course, he meant bring to light its true form so he could figure out what the hell it was.  It wasn’t moving, so it wasn’t currently much of a threat to the general populous (not that he gave half a toss about them, but you know, if you’re the main character you’ve got to pretend a little bit to be a hero, even if you’ve got a bag stuffed full of antiheroic tricks) but anything that looked that bad couldn’t be here to bring joy to the children.

So he’d rolled up his sleeved, squared off, chanted and pulled, bringing his raised forearms together to complete the seal he’d had tattooed on them an unmentionable number of years ago.  And it had worked, but only for a moment. It was nothing he’d ever seen before, and he didn’t want very much to ever see it again.  It seemed to be made of tentacles, except for its face… that face… John shook his head and tried to clear the image out of his mind, but it was stuck, and would be stuck there forever, probably.

He realized he still had the seal together when the thing writhed and groaned in pain, and he thought, ‘of course it hurts, you extra-dimensional monster.  A form like that can’t exist on this plane.’  He dropped the seal and it opened its (surprisingly human, he was expecting, I don’t know, red or black or something more interesting than brown) eyes.  Then it spoke, woozy and confused, and instead of the curses, hexes, and invectives he expected, all John got was a quiet, “Castiel? Why are you blonde?”


	18. Chapter The Seventeenth: In Which Hastur Just Can't Catch a Break

John took a step back as the thing tried to rise, but it seemed to be having some trouble.  Probably wasn’t used to having only two legs.  Or having legs at all.

“You aren’t going to help?  How did you end up here anyways?” the thing said, speaking as if it knew him.

“Sorry to disappoint, mate, but I’m not this Castiel.  I’ve never even heard of him.  Sounds like an angel name though, and me an’ angels don’t get along very well.”  John flicked some ash off his cigarette and stared, trying to work out what a partially manifested demon (and a full-blooded one too, if he knew what he as about, not the half-breeds which should be the only ones able to exist on this plane) was doing in an alley in London.  Ah, it had finally managed to achieve verticality. Lovely.  John gave its human guise a once over and felt a tinge of sorrow that such a nice suit had been wasted on a demon stupid enough to ruin it by getting London back-alley all over it.  That tie pin might be gold, though.  Clearly expensive tastes, looks human enough, so this can’t have been its first cross-over.  He momentarily wondered if this could be a possession gone wrong, and mentally checked his pockets for his Bible and flask of holy water.

Hastur, now more conscious and more recharged, though nowhere near fighting strength, looked at the man again realized what a very large mistake he had made in assuming this was Castiel. Though they shared a similar build and style of dress, this man’s face was hardened and lined by years of terrible sights and deeds, and his soul, ah even who knows how far away from home the smell was still the same, was damned, already addressed, postage paid in full.  Well, that was all he was going to get out of his observational skills, so he might as well ask. “Who are you?”

John smiled, and it reminded Hastur of one of his more unpleasant looks.  He was momentarily impressed.  “Name’s Constantine.  John Constantine.”  He waited, as if expecting the name to mean something to Hastur, the same expectation of reaction Spike had worn when he spoke about the Slayer.  But the name was unfamiliar to Hastur and the one emotion he had never mastered faking was fear.

“I’ve never heard of you,” Hastur said, with a half-apologetic shrug.

John frowned. “I’m number one on Hell’s and Heaven’s most wanted list.  I cheated Lucifer out of my soul and I’ve been sending countless numbers of half-breeds back to Hell where they belong, disrupting the great plans of Hell. I caused the archangel Gabriel to fall… None of this is ringing any bells for you?  Really?  I thought Hell was better at keeping its people informed.  About me at least.  I’ve pissed off most of the very important people down there.”

“I’m sure you mother must be very proud,” Hastur said, tiredly.  It just figured he’d run into someone with that kind of track record.  It just figured a human could do more to disrupt the plans of Heaven, could bag an _Archangel_ , and he couldn’t even get one lousy Principality.  “Well, Mr. Constantine, I’m sorry to provide such a disappointing and unrecognizing audience, but I’m not from around here, you see.”  
John rolled his eyes.  “No, you’re from Hell.” He reached into the inner pocket of his trench coat and pulled out a Bible and a flask that Hastur could just tell had something nasty in it.  What was it with these other universes and their abundance of holy water?  What kind of bumbling, obvious, and scatterbrained plays were their angels and demons running that humanity was so informed and so well-stocked and well-prepared against them?  He’d always thought the non-interference clause presented a fun challenge, not an impossible barrier that demanded tearing down and trampling over.  Oh, right, he was being threatened.

Hastur held up his hands and tried to look harmless.  Some of this world’s similarities had been worrying, and he wasn’t sure what holy water would do to him here, though he was sure it would hurt.  “What I meant was, I’m not from this universe.”  Constantine raised an eyebrow but didn’t put away the Bible and flask.  “Yes, I am a demon, but I’m not one of _your_ demons.  I don’t belong here, and I don’t want to be here.  I’m trying to get back to my world and I just made a wrong turning somewhere.”

“A wrong turning between universes?  One would think they would be hard to miss.”

Hastur gritted his teeth at the implication.  “You’d be surprised how difficult navigating the whole of all possibilities in time and space is.”

Constantine gave a slight head tilt of begrudging acknowledgement, but remained, on the whole, unimpressed.  “I’m still not really seeing your point, I’m afraid.  I think you’re trying to convince me not to banish you, because you don’t belong in my Hell, and it might not work.  But I don’t see why I shouldn’t at least give it a go.  Save the people of your world some trouble if it works, don’t you think?  They can consider it a public service.  Or are you going to try to convince me that on your world, demons aren’t dangerous and don’t interfere in the lives of living humans?  If banishing you doesn’t work, we can always try talking afterwards, though I do see how conversation might be a little strained.  I think we can work around that if that’s what it comes down to.”  Constantine unscrewed the top of the flask, opened the Bible, and began to read, beginning with the recitation of a standard prayer.

When Hastur began to feel an unpleasant tingling sensation from just these standardized, bastardized words, he realized that he was in trouble.  He was less afraid of being banished than he was of the holy water—he figured he could handle himself in anyone’s Hell, especially if being on that plane allowed him the freedom of manifesting his true form, but if words were this powerful, that blessed liquid would be like acid or worse.  He refused to be erased, utterly refused.  And so he bolted.

He shoved the man who called himself Hell’s Most Wanted backwards, hard enough to disrupt his chanting momentarily, and ducked under his arm as he swung it, feeling three concentrated points of burning pain on his arm and back where the splash of holy water had landed.  It was definitely more potent here, though the pain gave him the burst of energy he needed to push past it, push forward, run, make it to the mouth of the alley, turn and run, don’t look back, go, _go_ , _run_.

Hastur had never mastered faking fear, but he had mastered harnessing it a long time ago.

This wasn’t his world, but it was London, the city he had stalked Crowley up and down for longer than he cared to remember.  It wasn’t exactly the same, but he didn’t need to find someplace specific.  Just a place to hide, to recover, and to plan.  This was a city, a large one, and all human cities were rife with places to hide.  Humans, much as they liked to flaunt their status at the top of the actual and metaphysical food chain, were very much like vermin, like prey.  They had the tendency to create secret spaces, hidden, often underground, where they could hide themselves from each other, their institutions, their gods and themselves.  They built them everywhere they settled, and the more of them there were in one place, the more they needed to hide so the more hiding places they built.  This was a very large city.  And Hastur only needed to find _one_.

John, after regaining his balance, had pursued the demon, chasing him out of the alleyway, up the street, and around several blocks, but it had managed to evade him eventually, taking turns down tiny side streets even he hadn’t known existed, and never ones that ended conveniently with a dead end.  After wandering for ten minutes after losing sight of it, John realized he had well and truly lost his quarry.  He pocketed his Bible and flask, and walked slowly back to the main street.  While the demon had claimed not to know him, and had claimed it was from another universe, it had navigated London in the chase like a native.  That was surprising and worrying.  If it had been lying, this was obviously not its first trip up here, and he would have to get his contacts working on researching a possible hole in the universe that full-blooded demons could exploit for little holidays on Earth.  Otherwise, he’d have to admit that it was telling the truth, and it came from another universe that was fully stocked with its very own London.  He didn’t know which of those options he preferred.  Obviously the second would be easier, but the idea of there being more than one _Hell_ and more than one _Heaven_ made him uncomfortable in ways he wasn’t up for thinking about at this present junction.

He sighed and leaned against a building, lighting another cigarette to replace the one he’d lost in the chase.  He supposed this meant he’d have to do some research, see if he could find a mention of a demon that looked like that, and if not… he’d still hunt the world-jumping sucker down.  It was obviously vulnerable to holy water (or thought it was, the way it’s eyes had widened when he had unscrewed the cap of his flask would be something he’d keep in mind to warm himself on cold nights), and he couldn’t have full-blooded a demon running around his city, even if it couldn’t fully manifest.  So he made his way back to his flat, filled with purpose, as annoying and distasteful as that purpose was.

Hastur had found a place to hide, the perfect place.  Down a little street, and down an alley, and behind a house, and underneath everything, there were rooms.  He couldn’t have given directions to it, but if he left he knew he could find it again. The room he was in was dank, dark, cramped, windowless, and abandoned.  It was the safest he’d felt in a long, long, _long_ time.  He felt himself calming as he curled up on the cold, dirty floor to recharge.  He had the outline of a plan now, and he’d flesh it out when he was refreshed.  He’d find a library and find and steal some books of spells.  If they didn’t have them, he’d find a magic shop.  He’d find something, and he’d make his own portal.  That he had to do this while avoiding notice was unfortunate but nowhere near impossible.  He wasn’t known as the Duke of Lurk because he was loud and obtrusive.  And it would all work this time, because he was doing it himself.  He wouldn’t trust anyone else, and he wouldn’t rush. If he took this step by step, he’d get it right, and he could finally make it back to his universe, and out of these restrictive, uncomfortable, unfair other worlds that were so much like and so much unlike his own.  It had been a long time since he’d felt homesick, and it had never been for Earth, not back then, but as he closed his eyes to facilitate energy renewal, he felt the mild, nauseating swells of homesickness begin to rise before he released his connection to mental awareness.


	19. Chapter The Eighteenth: In Which This Whole Chapter Would Probably Be a Very Short Montage Scene, If This Were a Show

As Hastur rested, John began to contact his sources, seeing which threads of his web were still talking to him, which could be coerced, and which were dead.  He called Chas to let him know the situation (he’d probably like to know there was a half-manifested demon wandering around the neighborhood, for safety reasons) and got chewed out by his wife instead.  Still, he managed to give Chas the thing’s description (what he’d see anyways) and wring out a promise to keep his eyes open and call if he spotted it before John was hung up on (probably by Chas’ wife, though he really couldn’t blame her).

He doesn’t need to do much research—it can be all kinds of terrible fun to find out what hurts a demon in mid-fight, and he’d always preferred a bit of revealing verbal sparring leading to eventual demonic defeat over out and out fighting anyways—but he did need to have a bit clearer idea of exactly which of the hundreds of different demons it might be (or might be like) to know what to bring.  Oh, he could just walk around with his heavy arsenal—he could bring the Ace of Winchesters[1] out of the lockup, that would take care of nearly anything—but it was so cumbersome and it was difficult to bring it into a pub without notice.  He didn’t intend to let this demon, whatever he was, prevent him from enjoying his life, after all.

So he kept making calls, kept taking walks and calling in minor favors (no need to waste the big ones on this little nothing) and pushing until he heard what he wanted to hear.  It was probably one of the demons who specialized in chaos, but possibly a member of the Cthulhian demi-god circle.  That would explain the tentacles, but not the holy water, which tended to be less than effective against non-Christian mythologicals.  Awful thought—what if they were breeding across theistic lines?  Constantine shuddered and decided never to wonder about that again.

Armed with this fairly good idea and his essential travelling defense objects, he set about tracking it down so he could trap it and banish it, hopefully without having to get his hands dirty.  With that plan in mind, he went to a pub.

Hastur reconnected to the physical world slowly.  The swell of homesickness, strange for a demon and unclear to Hastur which “home” he was feeling sick for, that had risen as he disconnected had ebbed back, waning like the moon.  He felt stronger, but a few quick tests assured him that manifesting was still off the table.  That was fine.  He had his plan.

For the next couple of weeks, Hastur snuck around, raiding libraries, bookshops, gimmicky magic shops, spice shops, tiny religious shops, and, once, a pet shop (because nobody keeps snake intestines on hand anymore).  He gathered ingredients and potential spells and squirreled them away in the safety of his underground hovel.  He made a few tentative attempts, the first failing entirely to do anything, the second opening a portal (a small one, peep-hole sized, just to check) into what he assumed was this universe’s Hell, which he closed right away.  While these failures were frustrating, he counted them as progress and determined to remain focused.  More stolen books, more raided shops, another test, and another hole into an Earth this time—not his, but the right plane at least.

In between attempts at portals and midnight shop raids, Hastur tried meditating to check up on the state of his mental health in the aftermath of his battle with Glory (one of the bookstores he’d visited after hours was a new age one, chock full of self-help type books and pamphlets, and Hastur found he’d accidentally read half of one before he realized what he was doing and some of it had stuck with him like that circle of gum on the bottom of your shoe after you see a movie in a theater).  His self diagnosis was: not great, but certainly less likely to immediately fly off the handle than a week ago.  And so everything progressed in its time.

Constantine was getting nowhere fast, mostly because Hastur was keeping his activities quiet and non-abnormal.  He’d kept his eye on the local papers and his ear open to gossip on the street, but it seemed like the demon had just disappeared.  Maybe he’d gone back home to Hell.  Maybe he’d left England (in which case he was no longer any concern of John’s).  He had nearly forgotten about the demon (or Cthulhian-hybrid) until, nearly a month after the thing showed up in the alley, he got a call from Chas saying he’d spotted someone matching John’s description of the demon and maybe that was his guy because he’d been breaking into a magic shop.

Good old Chas.  John followed up this hot tip the next day, made nice with the rather ditzy woman who ran the place and found out what had been taken.  Mostly pretty tame stuff, generally used in conjuring and banishment spells, though one crystal of fairly good channeling strength had been pinched as well.  So it had either told the truth and was trying to open a door to home, or it had lied and it was trying to open a door to let someone (or someones) else through.  While John loved a good bet, he usually only gambled when he stood to win something and this was a rather nothing-lose situation, so it warranted his continued interference.  After all, why would God give _him_ this gift if not because he was supposed to use it to screw up as many people’s (and demons’ and angels’ and gods’) plans as possible?

He asked around the neighborhood and learned about the other break-ins.  All had been quiet and few shop owners had thought it worth it to get the law involved, with the exception of the pet shop owner, though it had done little good.  All of the break-ins had been within the last month and nearly all within a two mile radius.  There were a couple of abandoned tenements within that circle and Constantine would gladly have bet that it was holed up in one of them.  It was just a matter of a little more legwork and he’d have this thing cornered and banished in no time.  He set off to make a proper search of it.  If he could take care of this himself, today, maybe Chas’ wife would cut him enough slack to take her husband out for a celebratory pint.

Hastur was nearly there.  The last test had been close—Earth, wrong universe, but right mathematical base.  This next one or the one after that, with just a little more fine tuning and he’d have it.  He carefully drew the chalk circle and sigils, slightly modified from those in the fourteenth century text on summoning he’d managed to find in a bookshop that he was pretty sure took up the exact space Crowley’s angel’s did in their world.  The multiverse was funny like that.  He lit the incense and the candles and poured the sand, trying for a larger window this time so that, if it was the right world, he could just go through, and if it wasn’t he’d have an easier time finding the differences so he could fine tune the spell a little more. He began to chant, but paused as he heard a thump from above him.  He heard the creaks of floorboards as someone walked slowly across the floor.

This wasn’t the first time he’d been nearly interrupted—the last time, a homeless man had managed to find the way into Hastur’s underground.  Hastur had given in and eaten him.  He’d gotten a lot done that day.  The footsteps faded and Hastur resumed the spell.  The air above the candles rippled and parted, and a three-foot hole appeared in the air above them. It felt right, so right, and in his excitement Hastur didn’t hear the soft noises of footfalls on packed dirt coming slowly up behind him.  He leaned forward, curious but careful not to cross the sand circles lest he be sucked through before he was sure.  It looked like England, but not London, at it seemed that this gateway had opened up in the air above a river.  He’d have to recalibrate or figure out a way down before he crossed over.  He leaned a little closer, trying to make certain, absolutely certain, when he felt himself falling forwards.  Too late did he sense the presence of another, the human who was wanted by his Hell, too late did it occur to him that he should have swept the building top to bottom as his paranoia had urged.  With an undignified yelp, he fell through the portal and into the river of another world.

John hadn’t been able to believe his luck, catching the thing totally unaware with a portal already open.  It wasn’t a portal to Hell, and it’s possible that he’d just unleashed a full-blooded demon onto an unsuspecting world of innocents, but it wasn’t _his_ world of innocents, and therefore it wasn’t his problem.  He threw the stub of his cigarette through the portal before using the toe of his shoe to break the line of sand and close the portal.  Just to be sure, he cleaned up the candles and incense and smudged the chalk beyond readability. 

Then he left to call Chas.

Richard Pembroke was strolling along the bank of the river Ouse, indulging himself and his oral fixation with a cigarette and basking in his recent triumph over Zak (not that he knew yet) by hiring Hannah, when out of the corner of his eye he saw something large and dark falling from the sky and into the river with a splash.  Either it was a very enthusiastic jumper, Upstairs had gotten extraordinarily bad at finding landing sites (and who would they be sending now?  Did they not trust Zak enough to think he could handle himself without more backup than Tom and Mrs. Sheringham?  Who was even left to send?), or it was something else equally as exciting.

He walked slowly over to the bank and down the stairs so he could get a better look (and maybe interfere a little).  It was something human shaped, that much he could tell, and from the way it, no _he_ , was splashing around he wasn’t a very good swimmer.  The effort he was putting into it seemed to discredit the theory of “jumper,” so he was down to angel or very stupid human.

The man finally made it to the concrete edge and struggled to pull himself up, heavy as he was with water.  Richard made no move to help, taking a small step back to avoid having water splashed all over his suit trousers and shoes.  He leaned forward and tasted the confusion, anger, and misery that hung like a cloud around the figure.  Delicious.

When the man had finished scrambling and caught his breath, Richard finally offered a hand, intent on seeing what mischief he could create with a little touch and a little influence.  But as the skin of their hands touched, Richard gave a start and looked at the figure before him in shock.

Not angel then, nor man.  Richard had finally met another one of the fallen.

  


* * *

[1] SPN Fans: it’s basically the Colt; it’s what the Colt is most likely based on, but it’s a shotgun.  Also, this sets the story around issue 200 or so for Hastur’s time in the _Hellblazer_ world, but I’ve not read all of _Hellblazer_ and I’ve certainly not read it in order, so if people I mention (Chas, his wife) are dead or not speaking to him by issue 200, let’s just forget about that and move on with the story, all right gentle and loving reader mine?


	20. Chapter The Ninteenth: In Which I Think Richard and Hastur Could Actually Be Friends. Sort of.

As interesting and revelatory as this meeting was, it was physically and essentially unpleasant.  Both Richard and Hastur reacted in tandem, jerking their hands away as if electrocuted. Richard recovered first.  “Pardon me, old thing, but you seem to have me at a disadvantage.  I didn’t know there were any other fallen angels with permission to work on Earth.”

And once again, Hastur knew he was in the wrong world, though this meeting currently ranked highest in his tour (besides that business in the Montana bar, but I’m not really sure that should count as a _meeting_ ).  Before replying to (apparently) Hell’s representative on Earth in this world, Hastur made his now customary abilities check.  He found he could manifest wings (though for some reason they appeared black instead of his customary mottled grey and brown) but little else.  It seemed fallen angels were limited to touch and proximity based influence and didn’t have very interesting true forms.  Richard raised an eyebrow at Hastur’s strange behavior and began to wonder if Mr. Mountjoy hadn’t kicked him out of Upstairs because he was defective.

Finally satisfied with where he stood (well, with understanding where he stood—he wouldn’t be actually satisfied until he was back in a world, preferably his, where he could access his full array of powers) Hastur pushed himself to his feet, straightened his sopping suit the best he could and turned with as much dignity as he could must to the bemused resident demon.  “I am Hastur.  In my world, I am a Duke of Hell, though I don’t know that that means anything here.”

“In your world?  Would that be an imaginary one that exists only in your addled brain or does it have a more physical address?” Richard drawled, taking an amused drag from his cigarette.  Hastur clenched his jaw.  What was the point in attempting civility if you were simply going to be dismissed and disrespected out of hand?  Tired, wet, and bedraggled as he was, he drew himself up to his full height, which (to his everlasting joy) was several inches taller than the other demon’s, and hissed, “I assure you, it is very real.  Allow me to show you.” And with that Hastur placed his hand flat on the other’s head and pushed, trusting that the influencing this world allowed would also extend to his talents in brain play.

Richard stiffened, eyes wide, as images from another Hell, of other demons (millions, all unknown to him), another world—so alike but even in another’s memories there was the feeling of not quite right, something off, somewhere just past the corner of the eye right outside the visible range.  A full minute passed before he was able to pull himself away.

“I say,” he gasped, trying for his usual nonchalance and missing the mark by several inches—some of the images that had streamed behind his eyes had included memories of torments inflicted in a rather more hands-on manner than Richard preferred to operate in.  He was sure they would stay with him for a while.  “There’s no need to get nasty.  You must admit it seems a rather implausible story at first listen.”

Hastur raised an imperious eyebrow.  “I disagree.  I hope you can see why.”

Richard tried again—while he generally worked alone (and preferred it that way) and while he did enjoy conflict with angels, he saw no reason to make an enemy of this apparently alien fallen one.  Not yet, at any rate.  “I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot.  Might I invite you to indulge in a finger or two of whisky, and perhaps allow us to discuss your situation more in depth in the comfort of a pub?”

Hastur smiled, and it was almost pleasant.  “That sounds like an excellent plan.”

Richard led him to the nearby King’s Arm’s Pub.  ‘Isn’t Hastur still soaking wet?’ you may be asking, perceptive reader with solid short term memory that you are.  Yes, he is.  But being a fallen angel, he has (even here, because the universe cut him this _one_ break) the ability to ignore physical discomforts if he so chooses, and he is so choosing.  He probably also has a slightly elevated body temperature, since he’s Hellkind, or something.  So imagine that he dries off fairly quickly. Notice that Richard does not offer to do anything about his potential discomfort.  Notice also that Hastur makes no move to ask for assistance with this.  This is because they are both fallen angels.  The nearly companionable unspoken discomfort and stoicism was soothing to both, settling their earlier ruffled feathers.

They ordered drinks and began to converse, Hastur relaying only the important parts (the ones that didn’t make him look like an idiot) of his multi-universal journey.  Then they moved on to discussing this world, though the discussion was punctuated by outbursts from Hastur along the lines of “what do you mean there is _no magic_ here?  None at all?” “Why do you call him Mr. Mountjoy?” and “But really, lawyers?  Why are you all _lawyers_?” Whether and how Richard explained these last two questions is up to you, darlings, because Hastur took those questions right out of my mouth.

Hastur had reached three conclusions by the end of their info sharing session: 1) He must be terribly lonely, because he thought Richard was rather pleasant company (even with his tendency to audibly roll his tongue on inhales, which reminded Hastur rather distressingly of Crowley’s hiss); 2) though this world was limiting his abilities, it was significantly less dangerous for him than the other three he’d been through, because like his own world, very few people believed in angels and demons (or apparently holy ground, as Richard had just gotten done telling him about his frequent excursions to York Minster, which, had Hastur tried them in his world, would have at best resulted in a ten month migraine); and 3) he was almost certainly trapped here forever.  Without magic and without the ability to fully manifest his true, more powerful form, he had no way to coax, manipulate, or force his way through the universal fabrics.  This was disappointing and, later, when the shock of newness had worn off would likely be infuriating, but given that he was now dry, relatively safe, in a pub, drinking with tolerable company, he didn’t feel the sting of that fact as strongly as might have been expected.  He hadn’t felt this genuinely content since Russia… but now is not the time for that; let’s promote the cordial mood for just a while longer.

Time passed more rapidly than either of them noticed and before too long Richard realized he’d almost missed his daily Zak taunting session.  He smirked and asked Hastur, “How would you like to meet some of our angels?”

Zak was walking toward the pub he’d promised to meet Tom at after a quite successful day in court.  It was always so different when he wasn’t up against Richard, a refreshing change to his daily grind.  As he neared the pub and saw Richard approaching, deep in what appeared to be quite jovial conversation with a man Zak had never met before, he realized he’d begun to hope too soon and it was much safer to remain cynical about life on Earth.  Richard happy always meant a headache for Zak, every time.  He forced a smile as they met in the road outside the pub’s entrance and nodded in greeting, hoping to get out of a conversation.

“Zak, just the man I was looking for,” Richard said as he gave the other lawyer a once over.  “Good day in court?”

“What do you want now, Richard?” Zak asked, affecting an expression of long suffering patience.  It wasn’t especially difficult to affect.  
“I simply wanted to introduce you to my newest acquaintance,” he gestured to the man beside him, who was gazing at Zak curiously.  “Zak, this is Hastur, odd name, I know, comes from far away and he’s just arrived.  Hastur, this is Zak Gist, my most common courtroom rival.”

Zak extended a hand to get the formalities over with.  He saw Hastur’s smirk at the gesture but was too slow to retract it.  Hastur clasped his hand, squeezing firmly, and let just a tiny dribble of influence and essence pass through the connection.  When Richard pulled something like that with Zak, the world seemed to lose its color and a weight of misery descended into the pit of his stomach that stayed with him through the remainder of the day.  With Hastur, it was as though someone had taken a bucket of filth and poured it over the core of his being.  He pulled away, feeling nauseated.  He loved it when he was proved right about his cynicism.  He wiped his hand on his trousers, but that did nothing to diminish how disgusting he felt.

Hastur was still smirking.  “It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. Gist.”

“I’m afraid I can’t say the same.”  He turned to Richard.  “I thought they only let one of your lot out of the box at a time.  What’s going on?” he demanded.

Richard chuckled, reveling in Zak’s discomfort. Today was going swimmingly.  “Much as I would like to tell you that legions of us are lining up to storm the Earth and pillage and plunder it for souls, no, it’s nothing like you’re thinking.  Hastur’s not even really one of ours.”  He paused for effect.  “He’s from another world.”

Zak gave him a blank stare.  “You know, I’ve just recalled why I didn’t speak with you for all those years around the turn of the century.  It’s because you’re a prat.”

“Zak, Zak,” Richard protested.  “I’m telling the truth.  It’s all deeply strange, I know, but he really is from elsewhere.  He comes from another universe where Hell has aristocratic hierarchies.  Isn’t that darling?”

Zak shook his head.  “I’m done with this conversation.  If you won’t or can’t tell me the real reason you’ve expanded your team, fine.  But I have a meeting to get to and I’m done wasting my time with you.”  He turned back to Hastur.  “I wish I could say it was good to meet you but we’re both perfectly aware that that isn’t the case.”

“Is Tom here?” Richard asked, delighted.  “Do let me introduce him to my new acquaintance as well.”

“Absolutely not,” Zak ground out.  “In fact, don’t even come in this pub.  Don’t even stay on this street.”

Richard smirked and leaned forward, invading Zak’s personal space and biting his lip.  “Oh, what will you do, Zak?  Fight me?  It’s been a long time since we’ve had a good laying-on of hands.”

Zak just glared and stormed away and into the pub, where Tom had to spend the evening calming him down.

Richard and Hastur walked off, and Richard generously offered Hastur a place to stay, for a while, because the amusement he’d provided today was enough to make up for the inconvenience of sharing his space.  Oh, the look on Zak’s face—almost as good as the one he made when Richard thrashed him in court.  Perhaps tomorrow he’d see what kind of face he could induce on Zak when he showed up with Hannah.

Zak and Tom came back to the Belfry worried and their discussion with Mrs. Sheringham did little to alleviate the feeling.

“I’ve never heard of there being more than one fallen, _truly_ fallen, angel on Earth at one time.”  Her face was grim, and she was more serious than Tom had ever seen her in his short time on Earth.  “I think we’ll have to consult with Mr. Mountjoy.”


	21. Chapter The Twentieth: In Which, You Know, I Kind of Ship This

Over the next week, Zak and Tom had their work cut out for them with a truly terrible custody battle.  As heart-wrenching as the case would have been under normal circumstances, having to see Hannah again, and work against her when, had things and beings been different, he could have been working with her, made it harder than anyone had anticipated.  This left little time for the angels to deal with the Hastur problem.

And he _was_ being a problem.

After having a major freak-out the morning after his arrival, and breaking one of Richard’s favorite chairs (which he forced him to sign a contract pledging to replace, obviously after he found a job because he couldn’t just manifest money in this reality), Hastur acclimated fairly quickly.  He took his limited abilities as a challenge and took to walking around the city seeing what he could convince humans to do without even a brush of his infernal influence.  This exercise had improved his mood enormously.

‘Why would Hastur bother working—doing Richard’s work for him, really—when he doesn’t get anything out of it?  He’s not getting any credit for this.  Shouldn’t he be slipping into a depression coma slump thing?’ you ask, because you doubt my ability to convincingly write characters and scenarios.  No, I tell you.  Hastur enjoys being evil for the sake of being evil.  Schadenfreude is more than just a word for him.  It’s a way of life.  Also, it gives him something to do and it allows him to put off finding a real job because, really, what’s he gonna do?  He’s not gonna be a lawyer. He’s not gonna be a bin man.  Is he gonna work in an office?  That’s the only skill from his previous employer that transfers over to this plane, because torturers aren’t a thing that people are anymore (except for when that statement is false, but we’re not writing a political story), so he’s got to do something to subtly prove his worth to Richard so he can continue to mooch off of him and live on his couch.  That something just happens to be tainting and damning souls for him.

Hastur’s walks were slowly changing the mood of York, the taint starting on the edge and creeping its way inward, like the dark clouds heralding a thunderstorm that you see gathering on the horizon.  And Zak and Tom, busy with their difficult case, don’t notice for a week.  Mrs. Sheringham does, and she speaks to Mr. Mountjoy about it, but he never has and never will speak back directly.  His non-interference suggests to her that this is another test, though why he continues to push them, she can’t (or won’t, she has her suspicions after all) say.  When they finish the case and their celebration at a job well done (and temptations well resisted, in the case of Zak and Hannah), Mrs. Sheringham lets them know what’s been going on across York.

“Richard never did anything like this, not on this scale,” she said, “this Hastur means business—he’s not even adopted a human name, he’s not taken a job, he’s not trying to blend in.  But I’ve spoken to some of the people he’s changed and the other thing he’s not doing is influencing them.  All he’s done is spoken to them.”  She stood and paced the small space, wrapping her cardigan around herself more tightly, as if trying to contain her fears in the soft wool.

“What does Mr. Mountjoy expect us to do?  Is he queuing up more cases for us?  We can’t handle more than a few and he knows that,” Zak said angrily, the elation of a well-wrapped case disappearing as it always did the moment the next obstacle appeared.

Mrs. Sheringham shook her head.  “Mr. Mountjoy hasn’t made any sign that he wants our interference at all.” She met Zak’s eyes and he could see her fear, deeply felt, lurking right behind the words she wouldn’t quite say. “I don’t think he expects us to do anything.”

“Well, we can’t just let this happen,” Tom says, optimistic in his newness to everything.  “Surely we can undo this damage.  We’ll do just the same as him, speak to people, make them see the good and the wonder in this world.” He smiled and Zak closed his eyes and sighed, hating to be the one to break this innocence, but needing Tom to be on the same page, to understand how this world worked.

“Tom, while you are certainly free to try, it has been my experience that people are much more easily lead down the darker paths than they are up the lighter ones.  They’re naturally pulled in the wrong direction.  I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

Tom looked on him with pity, but Zak knew he was right, and he wasn’t exaggerating.  He’d years of experience trying and trying to convince people to do the right thing and watching them turn and skip merrily down the path of wrong.  The straight and narrow seemed to be straight uphill, and people hate exertion.  In the spirit of the old college try, they decided that tomorrow, while keeping an eye out for their next case, they’d take a walk around and see for themselves the extent of the damage Hastur had done in a week.

It was worse than Tom had imagined, but better than Zak had feared.

They spoke with a young girl who had been convinced it was all right to nick some things from the corner shop, which made her very popular with her less savory peers, but she was sorry about it, and with some discussion was convinced to leave the money for the items with an apology note on the counter.  They also spoke to man who had been convinced to seek a mistress though he had a wife of fifteen years waiting for him at home.  Though they tried, his position was immovable—he would have the Captain’s Paradise, a woman for the pleasures of the home and a woman for the pleasures of the flesh and there was naught they could say to convince him it was wrong (or any of their business in the first place, actually).  By the time they returned to the Belfry, they’d made progress on reversing some people’s paths, but none on stopping Hastur, who continued to sew seeds of discord and damnation.

Richard was impressed.  “Look at you, old thing.  All this in a week, I’m surprised.  I didn’t think anyone who called themselves a Duke knew how to do real work.”

Hastur and Richard were having their own celebration in Richard’s home.  Richard lounged on the couch, eating strawberries[1], while Hastur sat in Richard’s second favorite chair, enjoying a rather nice glass of Richard’s wine.  “The title isn’t ceremonial.  Duke is a military rank, and Earth is the front line,” Hastur smirked, pleased with himself.

Hastur was rapidly realizing that he would be content to stay in this world forever.  Richard’s company was more than tolerable, it was pleasurable.  Hastur was meant to be one of a pair—he had been one of Those Two Bad Guys, it had been his role in life, stamped into his essence, a part played for so long that it had become a necessity.  He did less well on his own, and his attempts at greater things had required him to try to recruit a sidekick at the very least, though the imp had ultimately failed him.  But Richard… this was something, someone he could work with, a chance to reprise Those Two Bad Guys, but upgraded, a Dual Boss, if you will, the darker side of the evil pair.  Simply put, he wanted a partnership, and was well on his way to securing Richard’s confidence in his abilities so he might broach just such a subject, though Richard looked as though he might say yes to such an arrangement right now.

The only sticking point was going to be Zak.  Richard had a, shall we say, fixation on that angel.  Hastur understood that this meant he was off limits for direct interference from anyone other than Richard himself.  He could understand the proprietary feelings (isn’t that why he’d felt to angry, so bereft when Crowley had… but not yet, this isn’t the time, soon darlings), but he thought it was perhaps a bit too proprietary.  A bit too close.  This wasn’t his world, of course, and far be it for him to comment on the culture of the natives, but he thought this might be the point of disagreement that could ruin his plans.  So he waited, gaining Richard’s respect, if not his trust, and they passed enjoyably evil evenings in each other’s company.

Things only got worse in York.  Zak and Tom couldn’t keep up with the demands of both the court cases and Hastur’s ever growing list of converts to the path that rocks.  They were worn out, and their bad mood led to bad performances, creating a vicious spiral of angelic ineptitude.  Mrs. Sheringham continued to try to get into contact with Mr. Mountjoy, or convince him to act, or do anything at all that was different from what was currently happening.

A month and a half after Hastur arrived, Mr. Mountjoy finally acted.

Hastur and Richard were walking along the bank of the Ouse, discussing Richard’s current case, basking in snippets of misery that occasionally floated by them, and scaring geese.  It was a lovely evening, and Richard had missed his daily Zak taunting without noticing (though Hastur certainly had, and made a big, red mental note of it on his internal plan sheet).

They had paused by the foot of the Skeldergate Bridge, when they heard a low rumbling and the earth beneath their feet began to shake.  What began as a look of confusion became a look of horror on Hastur’s face as the earth began to crack beneath him, opening to reveal a dark void.  “No!” he cried, trying desperately to hang on to the edges of the crack, but unable to fight the pull of the void and the pressure of Mr. Mountjoy’s will.  He looked Richard in the eye, and managed “please—” before he was pulled through and the earth sealed itself.  Richard looked up at the sky and let out a scathing, “Was that really necessary?” before walking back to his flat alone.  His next few interactions with Zak were especially vicious.

Hastur was nowhere.  It was the Void, but not the Void, no starlight of worldly life sparkled through any cracks.  It was simply nothingness.  And it was terrifying.  He screamed his rage, frustration, and fear into the nothingness but it made no sound.  It was as if he had been erased, but was conscious of his erasure.  For a moment, he thought fondly of Hell.

Then he felt it.  The pull, the niggling voice at the back of his mind.  A summoning.  A general call for any available demon.  He latched onto its faint trail and focused all of his effort on connecting and answering.  It heard and latched onto his essence, dragging it from the nothingness to corporeality in one disorienting and uncomfortable flash of a moment.  And Hastur existed again.

He looked into the spotty face of the young wizard who had cast the summoning and then down at the inadequately drawn protection circle that he stood in.  He grinned a crazed grin of triumph and grief and manifested fully, driving the young man to gibbering madness before devouring him.  He breathed the magic laden air in his true form and knew he was nowhere near his world, but on one which had the structural instability to support monsters such as him indefinitely.  He could live here and feed.  Or… he reached his consciousness a little deeper.  He knew this world.  He could get back from here.

While Hastur would mourn his ejection from Richard’s world, know, dear reader, that he shouldn’t feel it too keenly. It is a world with an expiration date, set a little over a week after Richard’s next case with Zak.  It was a world in which the angels lost.

  


* * *

[1] I wasn’t going to interrupt again, but my god, if you don’t know who any of these people are because you haven’t watched _Eternal Law_ I just… I can’t Richard’s oral fixation…  He actually does just eat a bunch of strawberries in episode five or six.  Just, a whole box. Just constantly things in his mouth.  Okay, you can go back to the story now.


	22. Chapter The Twenty-First: In Which Hastur Didn't Come From the Dungeon Dimensions, but He Knows Somebody Who Did

Hastur came down from his soul-devouring high slowly, feeling the pulses in this world’s natural magical field as birds feel the Earth’s magnetic map (or whatever birds and other migratory animals feel).  It was intoxicating, and so very familiar.  He searched his memory in the candle-lit room, idly picking his now human again teeth with a broken bone fragment.  Ah, yes.  The disc-world, the impossible one, traveling through space on the back of four giant elephants who stood in turn on the back of a galaxy-swimming turtle.  This world was a slapdash construction, leaking magic and life force into the Void and elsewhere, always on the verge of destroying itself, imbuing its inhabitants with powers beyond their station and their ken, beyond what their morals and knowledge could handle.

He’d come here millennia ago, took an unauthorized vacation from Hell’s demands and schedule.  He’d opened a doorway in one of the subbasements of his office Downstairs and slipped through so easily, not even having to tear the world’s fabric, which parted like water, like a slit in a silk dress, letting him slip through. With Ligur.

Ligur.  Yes, now we can talk about this.

Hastur’s mood went down like a lead balloon, dropping from the excitement of feeding and magic to the pits of nostalgic despair.  Because that trip had been fun—they’d shed their corporeal form shortly after arrival, terrorizing the locals, the wizard’s who’d been stupid enough to use their magic so carelessly, who’s work had allowed such abominations entry into their world, to suckle upon their natural springs of supernatural energy, so absent in the more well-formed and well-guarded worlds.  They’d had a spree, and afterwards they’d slipped back into human guises, slipped away from the wizard’s amassed offensive powers, and had a different sort of spree.

Ligur was… he had been his partner.  He’d been infuriating, and often, too often, Hastur had come _so close_ to killing him, had dreamed about erasing him from existence, utterly, entirely, had even vowed once to do just that.  They had actually killed each other’s corporeal forms on several occasions (once, on one of their first join trips to Earth, Ligur had done so on accident, which was, if Hastur remembered correctly, the time he’d vowed that if anyone was going to kill Ligur, it was going to be him) and it had left them both in terrible moods for decades, but they always got over it.  No one else was as constant, not in the same marginally pleasing way.

Ligur had been annoying, disgusting, terrible at understanding humanity’s changes and progress, a lightweight, and an insufferable bastard, but he had been Hastur’s insufferable bastard.

Hastur felt stretched, like a human running on too little sleep and not enough food, though there was no reason for that to be the case, as he’d sat and replenished his energy enough in Richard’s world, and the free magic infusion of the Discworld worked it’s… well, magic on his system.  He should feel elated. He could get to his Earth from here, he knew he could.  But for some reason, he didn’t feel the same drive, the same push.

Was it all this hoping?  Hope was a disease and weakness, and not one demons (or most humans) could afford to indulge in.  Even the Spartans knew this, and modern television drove that point home to random teenagers and almostadults who should be doing something other than watching _Supernatural_ with their time.  All of this expectation, shown to be wrong again and again and again, and then to be sure, completely sure that he was trapped and trying to create a place in a new world, working hard at it, _finding_ a place, and then to be stripped of that as well?  He could go back to his original plan now, he knew, he could get to Earth and hunt down Crowley and his angel.  He could get back his credibility and resume his rightful place in Hell and become more efficient having gotten closure on everything once and for all, finally _finally_ move past this.  This was perfect, exactly as he planned.

So why did he feel so hesitant, so unexcited, so… empty?

He stood and straightened his suit, pushing past the lingering fringes of his nostalgia and crushing the seeds of doubt they had placed in his garden of evil plans.  He could move forward now, and he would.

He walked over to the shuttered window of the student wizard’s room and opened it, trying to get his bearings, hoping things hadn’t changed too much since he’d visited (who knew how time flowed here, with its slow light and living darkness?).  He realized immediately that he was in Unseen University (the very place he’d first crossed over) and smiled.  This was still here, still the same, and the first place he could try to make a crossing back to Earth.

He shrouded himself from perception (so easily done here, might was well indulge in miracles he didn’t have to report, miracles that took so little out of him, given freely by the flippant construction of this hilarious universe) and walked out of the room, slipping past the several students scurrying through the hallways, some on their way out, to slip over the wall and indulge in some forbidden pleasures, some on their way back from having just such an adventure, and made his way down, to the basements, past the servants and the unseen workers who made the University run.  Down in the belly of the building, he found the place of his previous crossing, but found it changed. It had been rebuilt, fortified (he had forgotten what a mess he and Ligur had made of the place, and he didn’t realize he was sporting a small, sad smile that when unnoticed as there was no one to see), and his probing tests showed that the wizards had learned something from his (or another creature’s, he didn’t doubt that something else had been able to breach the nonexistent defenses of this world) visit.  So it would have to be somewhere else.

He made his way back up, into the more populated sections of the building, and found the library.  He paused, thinking he might find a map, and from that an indication of where another weak point might be.  At his entrance into the room (should I say building?  The Library of the Unseen University is TARDIS-like in its construction and existence, the massive quantity of books, magical and otherwise, creating the largest L-space phenomenon in all the known multiverse) he realized that there might be a problem.

The Librarian, who had been sitting on his desk, enjoying his lunch banana, could smell something incorrect lurking in the doorway of his library.  It smelled like the Dungeon Dimensions, and made the hair on his body stand on end.  He couldn’t see anything there, but that didn’t matter—he trusted his other senses where things like this were concerned, and that had often given him an advantage he wasn’t about to ignore now.  He curled his lip, revealing a mouth full of shockingly large teeth and focused on the doorway, projecting an air of protective menace in the general direction of the wrongness.

Hastur saw this and realized he wasn’t shielded from this… was that a monkey?  Wait, did they have a monkey running the library at this university?  He shook his head.  He didn’t have to deal with this.  He turned and left.

The Librarian relaxed as he felt the wrongness move away from the door and down the hall.  He should probably tell someone, but speaking with the Archchancellor was always such a chore. Well, if the wrongness did anything he’d probably hear about it and he could help then.  Until that point, he was going to sit here and enjoy his lunch banana.

Hastur left the University and stood in the street, closing his eyes and taking a closer look at the magical field of the world, trying to located the places it was strongest and the fabric likely the weakest.  He could feel… something, to the…. How did they do directions here?  Hubwards and Rimwards?  Whatever, _that_ direction, not only a high concentration of magic, but a very faint pull, a place of conjunction that was trying to break through, parts of space and time that should never have touched, pressed together, trying to open a doorway.  This was perfect, exactly what he needed.

The trouble was, how to get there?  He could fly and try to navigate by the world’s magic-field, but not knowing the world beneath him or how far he had to go this seemed dangerous and tiring.  He looked for a mode of transport, and saw horses.  Horses and him had never gotten along, as animals had a generally sharper sense of the truth of things, and his human guise had never really fooled them.  Horses tended to panic around him.  He supposed it was too much to ask that this world had invented a form of transport that didn’t rely on animals, especially given how entrenched in magic it was.  That tended to limit technological growth.

He released his shroud, letting himself be visible again, and approached a man who appeared to be selling sausages.

As soon as C.M.O.T. Dibbler saw the man in the suit approaching him, he knew he’d made a sale.  He was obviously not from Ankh-Morpork, and tourists… oh tourists.  They were his favorite creatures.  He seemed to be asking for advice on travel, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want a sausage.  Everyone wanted a sausage from Dibbler, even when they protested that this was not the case.  They would buy one anyways.  See, there was money, changing hands, and…oh, he’d eaten the whole thing with nary a grimace.  Strange, that.  Still, a sale was a sale.  He pointed the (presumable a) man (though now Dibbler wasn’t so sure) in the direction of the Coast Carriage, recognizing the place the man had described as Holy Wood, though why anyone would want to go there now, after the collapse of the moving pictures industry, he couldn’t begin to imagine.

Hastur, feeling vaguely ill, took the Coast Carriage to Holy Wood, paying for everything with coins drawn from the ether, and realized there might be a problem.  This was the place, he could feel the pull, but there was nothing here.  He walked from the carriage into the beach, across the seemingly endless sand, following the pull, weak though it was.  It was still there, and that was all he needed.

He found the place where the pull centered and opened his eyes.  It was just more sand, some rocks visible, but in no meaningful pattern, nothing to give him a clue.  But then he realized, the pull didn’t end there; it continued, straight downwards.

So Hastur began to dig.  He had forever, and access to his full spectrum of powers, so it was fine.

He made his way through the sand and the rock, reaching the inner chambers, aged and decayed though they were.  He followed the pull through the wreckage to the center.  And there it was, the place he needed.  He reached with his power, pushed, and stepped forward.

Hastur climbed through the crack in the wall of the house of a woman named Amy Pond, and took a deep and unnecessary breath.

He’d finally made it to Earth.


	23. Chapter The Twenty-Second: In Which A Villanous Breakdown Occurs

It took Hastur a few moments to realize that he’d actually done it.  He’d actually made it back.  His abilities check had left him with no doubts, able to manifest and miracle as he willed, but at the customary cost—nothing too easy or too hard.  He checked the fabric anyway, to be sure, absolutely sure, past truth to absolute certainty.  It was right, the right mathematical base, the right feel, the right flow.  Perfect, just as he remembered (it seemed so long ago, and maybe it was, he didn’t know how long he’d been gone from the Earth’s perspective).

He left the house with the crack in the wall and made his way to London, sometimes flying, seeing comfortingly familiar landmarks pass beneath his now appropriately mottled gray and brown wings, sometimes walking, basking in the feeling of correctness, of not having to push for a place that wasn’t yours.

He knew where he was headed—London, Soho or Crowley’s fancy flat—but he didn’t hurry.  He didn’t feel the same drive that had spurred him out of Hell.  It wasn’t contentment, it wasn’t forgiveness that had rid him of it.  He just felt empty, drained, but he pressed on regardless.  He needed something to do, some reason to go, so he chose this, because it was familiar and understandable.  He imagined that when he saw that smug snake’s face the old rage would return and he could do what he’d set out to do, with relish and a little extra pain to make up for the nonsense of world travel he’d gone through.  The lack of motivation, of excitement that he felt when thinking about torturing Crowley did not accurately represent what he would feel when he finally achieved his long sought goal.  It couldn’t.

In this frame of mind, he gradually approached London, and found the angel’s bookshop, and a familiar feeling of embarrassment washed over him as the sight of it reminded him of his dismal failure and his arrest. But even this didn’t fan the dying embers of the rage that had driven him since the failed apocalypse, since the day he’d fallen.  The shop looked and felt empty, lights out and windows staring like blank eyes.  So he made his way to Crowley’s flat.

He reached the door and paused, overcome by another wave of nostalgic embarrassment as he remembered his attempt to kill Crowley with his own plants and before that when he had stood with Ligur right here, so confident in how the scene would play out and so very, very wrong about it.  He listened at the door, but heard nothing.  He flicked his wrist and the door opened for him.  The plants he remembered were still here, and there were two wine glasses on the counter that looked recently used, so it seemed Crowley hadn’t moved.  He’d probably just left.  Hastur thought about lying in wait for him (and probably the angel, too, if that second wineglass was anything to go by), but that felt desperate and uncomfortable, so he simply left, not bothering to close the door behind him.  Let Crowley wonder.

He left the flat and began to wander, unintentionally making his way to St. James' Park.  He was slowly drifting into a deeper and deeper pit of despair when he stumbled across Crowley and his angel, sitting side by side on a bench, smiling and talking and laughing and feeding the few patient ducks that had still stuck around as the sun began to set.  It was a sickeningly sweet scene, something Hastur imagined you would see in a romance movie, and it sparked _something_ inside him that forced him to approach.

“Crowley,” Hastur growled, the sound ripping through the peaceful scene like a chainsaw through tissue paper.  Both Crowley and Aziraphale jumped up, eyes wide, faces shocked and guilty and afraid.  Crowley maneuvered himself slightly behind Aziraphale, probably unconsciously but who knew, Hastur wouldn’t put it past him to be that much of a coward.  
“Hastur!  We… uh… where, um, where’ve you been?  No one’s seen you in… um… must be fifty years?  We all… we ho—I mean, we thought you were dead.  There was a memo about your disappearance from Downstairs, they, uh, they said you’d just vanished.  Where, um, where were you?”  He looked concerned, but Hastur knew that concern was just for himself, for his own skin.  That angel, the one he’d professed so disgustingly to love during their last encounter, the one he’d been willing to die for, but who still hadn’t been able to make Crowley rise, was trying to protect him now, the coward.

Hastur strode forward, meaning to manifest something, wings, true form, some monstrous visage to burn into their minds as the last thing they would ever see before he destroyed them utterly.  He meant to make a last witty quip, to justify his new role as the Big Bad of the story, not just one of Those Two Bad Guys anymore.  He meant this to be the final showdown, his victory, absolute.

What actually came out of his mouth was spoken in a sobbing rage, starting choked and building until he was nearly unintelligible: “You!  You, you bastard! You ruined my _life_ my entire _existence_ my _everything_.  Ligur was all I had you _snake_ and you took that away.  I didn’t even know, I didn’t even imagine—Why should you get to be happy while the rest of us suffer?  What makes you so special you entitled little shit that you should get to _saunter_ your way through existence, living on Earth while the rest of us burn, coasting your way through existence on one impressive feat, spending your time drinking and eating and sleeping and fucking and indulging every human vice, everything enjoyable and receiving no punishment no suffering unlike the favored humans.  You’ve been more bloody blessed than the whole Goddamned lot of humanity, his chosen ones.  You fucker.  You absolute twat.  _You_ get to have your cake and eat it too and the universe just bends over backwards to let that paradox fly.

“Where have I been?  _Where have I been_?  I’ve been crawling through alternate universes trying to get out of Hell to here—you disobey the Plan of the Almighty and you get to remain on Earth, indulging yourself and consorting with angels and I try to take some well deserved revenge and the universe turns it against _me_ and I get arrested for _treason_?  You’re up here fucking angels and _I’m_ committing treason?  In what bloody world does that make any sense?  Every world I visited, every one I was persecuted, chased, fought, hated, and ejected.  No matter what I did, it was the same.  Do you know how many times I’ve had holy water thrown on me since I left Hell?  Do you?  Of course you don’t.  Every fucking universe, holy water.  And did it kill me?  Did it put me out of my misery?  Out of both of our miseries?  Obviously not!  I can’t even die!

"If that wasn’t bad enough, I finally found a world that I could live in.  I was going to just let everything go, all my obsessive hatred, and move on.  I was going to make a new life.  And their God kicked me out!  I almost had…what I had with Ligur.  I thought I could find it again.  I thought this was another chance, _my_ chance, and then the ground fucking opens up beneath me and He didn’t even have the decency to put me in a real world!  It wasn’t even the Void proper!  It was _nowhere_ —He would have left me to rot for eternity in utter _nothingness_ , I who had been an angel once, like you.  But you get a second chance and I get thrown into the ass-end of the universe.  Does that seem like a loving Father to you?  Because it sure as fuck doesn’t to me.

“And you don’t even know what you have!  What you’ve denied me!  You sit on this stupid park bench with the fucking glorious sunset and you just…you just sit here.  You’re a _goddamned demon_.  You _can’t_ love, you shouldn’t be able to.  It should have been stripped from you when you fell, with the rest of his Grace.  A kind Father would have at least made the transition complete.  But He didn’t, did he?  And you can love.  So either you’re so bloody special you’re a fucking miracle, or we all can love _and none of the rest of us have ever realized it_.

“But, you see, the thing is, some of us had, had suspected but didn’t voice it because that would be trouble, that would be disobedience, that would be rebellion against the Plan that we thought we’d already rebelled against.  You, Crowley, you, you little snake, are the only one who ever truly rebelled, in the end, and you get handed the world on a platter.  Well, some of us didn’t get to have your extended vacation on Earth, didn’t get the chance to think without the screams of the damned ringing in our ears day and night for eternity, didn’t get to act as we pleased without the threat of the torture being turned on _us_ and so how could we become anything different.

"I fucking loved Ligur.  Are you happy now?  You bastard, and you, Father, are You happy?  I loved him but I couldn’t be sure and it could never be admitted and nothing could ever come of it because we were trapped in an endless cycle of violence that only you, Crowley, escaped.

“I could have been _happy_ but I didn’t even know it until it was too late.  You robbed me of my _only_ chance.  And I know it was the only chance, I’m not being fucking dramatic, because I tried in multiple universes to find something else and I was denied even there.  You took that away from me.  You’ve taken everything away from me, your one act destroyed everything I had and everything I could ever have.  And it was shit anyways.  Ligur was awful, and seeing him reminded me of Heaven because we both knew each other there.  We figured that out pretty quickly.  And when you can remember that and then have to see what we’ve become, it destroys you even more, it pushes you past redemption, past ever wanting to seek it.  The only chance I had was that stupid piece of shit and you denied me _even that_.

"I hope you’re happy.  You better be goddamned happy because everything you have, _everything_ is against the order of this cruel world.  You're the golden child of the universe and the rest of us will continue to suffer and hate for the rest of eternity and beyond.  Because Hell will never win; if we ever do try again, Hell will lose and we all know it.  It’s in the Plan and we never deviate from that.  Never.  Except you.

“I can’t— I can’t even—

“I’m so done.  I’m so done with this world, and with you, and your blessed angel, and your blessed existence.  I tried so hard to get here, thinking I could get home. _Home_.  But this isn’t my home.  There’s nothing here for me.  There’s nothing anywhere.

“So enjoy your Goddamned life, you bastard.”

With that, Hastur turned away from the angel and demon that were staring at him in shock and walked away.  He kept walking until he reached a bridge.  He walked to the middle of it and hopped up on the railing and sat.  He touched his face, and his hand came away bloody, the closest thing a demon could get to tears.  He screamed his pain into the painted sky and in the back of his mind he thought he could hear a song about stars.


	24. Epilogue: In Which We Try to Find a Moral or a Point or Something

Well, perhaps that awkwardly inserted _Les Mis_ reference to Javert right before his suicide was improper and depressing and totally inaccurate.  Now, I’m not a fabulist, and there’s probably not a moral here, though I did once try to start a belief system called the fabulists (probably spelled the fabulousts, so that it would be easily distinguishable from the actual real fabulists) that advocated feeling fabulous about yourself all the time, because you are.  It was really uplifting.  But that’s not really important right now.

So I guess one potential point of this story is that you can never go home again.  Like in _Homeward Bounders_ , one of the most depressing young adult novels I’ve ever read, though I’m pretty sure the point _of that_ was something about growing up and never getting to go back to childhood.  It was a good book, just sad.  Though the main character did make really good friends along the way and Hastur pretty much didn’t make any, except Richard, but that world ended so he’s probably dead.

But this was supposed to be a funny story.  Where did it go so wrong?  Maybe it’s because I really think Hastur can’t make any friends, and because I can’t write funny.  Let’s try another track.

Another potential point of this story is that evil never prospers.  Crowley got to have a second chance because he’s not really evil.  At least, he’s evil with standards, which is definitely not true of Hastur.  And so this story is about why, if you’re a bad person, and you change the outer scenery but not the inner scenery, your life won’t improve.  That could be a thing, right?

A third potential point of this story is not to end on a sad note when you’re trying to write something humorous.

Sometimes, you just need a good purge.  After Hastur’s Villainous Breakdown and purge on the bridge, he felt better.  A good kind of empty, like he’d bathed in the purging flames of Hell.  And like I said in the prologue, Hastur had never been one for deep introspection, and maybe that had been the problem.  Too much thinking was bad for Card Carrying Villains, especially when they were trying to be Big Bads against their normal station.  The only thing he really took from his rant was that true rebellion against the Plan got you the goods.  So he decided to take a leaf from Crowley’s book and just say no to the Plan and the universe.

He didn’t feel like going through all the trouble of magic spells and the void and that, so he tried looking up Loki.  He found him doing some kind of off-again, on-again villain deal in New York with some people who played dress-up and called themselves “The Avengers,” but he found an off-again time when Loki wasn’t in the middle of a complicated and evil plot to set up a lunch date.  Loki was getting to be pretty recognizable (not bad, thought Hastur, for someone who’d been out of the public eye for some time. If he had been thinking of staying, he might have had looked him up anyways just to get some publicity tips), so they had to pick an off the beaten path sort of place.  They had Italian.  It was delicious.  They had a good talk; Hastur was willing to let Loki vent all day if it got him better directions on how to travel between worlds safely and quickly, though as luck would have it, he only needed a couple of hours.  Armed with this new information and the promise to write if he found a world defenseless and ripe for the picking that he didn’t take for himself, Hastur set off on another, better, universe hop.

He took it slow, making sure to prop the door open at each stop, to be certain he didn’t get locked in somewhere he didn’t want to be.  He tested the waters on a planet made of water.  Well, rather, quicksilver, but it looked kind of like water, only shinier.  There really wasn’t anything living there, but it looked really pretty.

He found, by accident, the world without shrimp and the world where everything was shrimp.  He left those both very quickly.

He looked in on a world that seemed to be a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but he wasn’t really into planet-wide wars anymore, so he didn’t stay for long.

He stopped by his half-brother’s realm, but you know how family is—trying to get you to watch their brood while they to go off and devour the minds of the unworthy.  So he didn’t stay very long there either, but no one ever stays long with their relatives if they can help it, and Hastur certainly could.

He found a world that called itself _Raxacoricofallapatorius._ He had trouble with the pronunciation, but the beings that inhabited it were pretty interesting.  He stayed for a while, until he got wind of an incoming controversy. Then he split.

It didn’t feel like running, because Hastur wasn’t propelled by fear.  It felt like freedom, something he’d never thought he’d feel (not “feel again,” because unfallen angels are no more free than their brethren if they stick to the Plan, which they do, seeing as they remain unfallen).  It was glorious, though if asked to describe it, that’s not the word he would use, given its godly connotations.  He thought of the multi-universal spree he’d had back in the 600s, and this topped even that, because there was no one but himself to please.

There were times he thought briefly about trying to find Richard’s world, but the way he’d been ejected had made it pretty clear he wasn’t welcome there at all, so he decided to simply move on.  It’s a good thing too, seeing as he’d never be able to find it, as, by now, it had been wiped out of existence completely, lights off and chairs up, erased by a fickle, unhappy God.

He tried out a universe that still had dragons, but he found he didn’t get along with them any better than he did with horses, except that horses didn’t have the ability to set him on fire.  Still, on most worlds with dragons, there was an excess of magic, so he was able to replenish his energy and heal his corporeal form without too much difficulty.

One fine day, he found himself somewhere familiar.  An Earth, not his, no, but similar and that almost right feeling was welcome this time, after spending a while in a universe inhabited by beings made of silica-crystals.  He’d opened the doorway in a forest, a lush boreal thing, all firs and spruce, smelling like resin and cold air.  There was snow on the ground, and Hastur took a moment to revel in it—non-Earth planets had no snow, and he’d been avoiding the Earth-types for a while, longing for a change and a guarantee he _wouldn’t_ end up back home.  He spent some time wandering around the forest, met and wrestled a grizzly bear, taming it and taking it on adventures in the wilderness. When he got bored of that, he led the bear to a well known and well used campsite and set it loose on the unsuspecting campers.  He laughed and part of him, the traitorous part he’d managed to avoid since leaving his Earth, felt the urge to turn and share the laugh with someone.

He took that to be a sign that he should seek out some company (though not in the same way he knew those stray thoughts were urging him to do) and so he made his way to civilization.  Seeing as he was in Canada, this took a while[1].

He walked and flew, alternating as he got tired or bored.  It was peaceful.  He’d come to be at peace with peace, something he’d never suspected would happen, not in his wildest imaginings and nightmares.  But so it went. Sometimes you go through Hell (then Earth, then Hell again, then the multiverse) and come out the other side with a different understanding of things.

He came upon a town, days later.  It seemed deserted, and recently, some of the houses with doors hanging open, revealing lovely, well-furnished homes, no glass broken, nothing stolen, nothing disturbed.  Strange, this.  He walked down the main street, looking into buildings that still had their lights on, casting a warm glow out into the darkening lane.  It was a scene of the sweetest desolation, begging for a camera or a more receptive audience.

As it was, the empty houses and the empty town were stuck with Hastur, so they’d just have to deal.  As the sun set, he heard a low growling noise coming out of the forest, and he thought he could see movement in the lower ferns and trees.  What emerged from the forest as the sun finally dipped below the horizon line was a whole cadre of Sasquatch (Sasquaches?  Sasquatchi?  Sasquiii?  I don’t know the plural of Sasquatch.  Just work with me here, you’re almost done) clumping and thumping their way into town.  Well, if these guys just moved in, it’s no wonder everyone thought the neighborhood had gone down the drain.  While Sasquatch were normally quite peaceful, they were also normally loners, and this was definitely a pack (or a cadre, like I said earlier.  Or a murder—no that’s probably just crows) and it didn’t look especially peaceful.  Hastur grinned.  This would be a nice challenge.

He did try diplomacy first—some creatures were able to communicate even if they couldn’t do so with humans—but all he got back were snarls, hostility, and eventually violence.  So he responded in kind.  Someone or something had changed their natural behavior, but Hastur wasn’t, oh, Helen Magnus or anything, so the why didn’t matter to him.  Neither (anymore) did the fact that he was technically doing something good.  This wasn’t his world and it wasn’t his problem, but he could make it his problem if he wanted because he had free will now and he was choosing to exercise it.  So he fought them.  He didn’t manifest his true form because that got boring after a while and he wanted a bit of a challenge.  He won (eventually) but it was close and very interesting.  Not being a hero-type individual, he didn’t then go on to try to find the residents or even clean up his mess.  He did walk into one of the abandoned buildings that happened to be a bar and steal some of their very expensive wine.  For the road.

And so he travelled Canada, essentially becoming a hunter in the world he had figured out was the Winchesters’ for shits and giggles because he could.

Eventually word filtered through the hunters’ information network that there was either a really good but amoral hunter or a really bad but lucky one patrolling Canada that no one had met.  The Winchesters, in upper New York at the time they heard this, decided to check it out.  They managed to get by border patrol with one of their fake passports, because nobody really cares if you’re supposed to be in Canada or not.  While Canada is a very massive place, entry through New York was pretty easy and the latest mess the hunter had left behind was in Ontario.

Hastur found the Winchesters before they found him.  He grinned at their shock when they opened the door to their hotel room and saw him.

“Hello, boys.”

  


* * *

[1] No offense, Canada.  ILU, I just don’t understand you.


End file.
